Mozilla is preparing the release of Firefox 4 with a bang. The final patches for Beta 12 have passed QA and have been put into a first RC1 build, which is likely to be the final version of Firefox 4 as well. Mozilla also announced its own HTML5 showcase and the developer release of the web apps project, which is likely to result in web apps stores for Firefox.

Mozilla has the finish line in sight. The company addressed the final bug yesterday and confirmed the status of the browser late yesterday as well. The first non-public RC1 build surfaced earlier today on Mozilla’s FTP server to go through a round of QA. There has been no information about a public RC release, but we would consider Monday or Tuesday next week as a good guess.

Mozilla intends to get Firefox 4 RC1 out to about 3 million users and spend “another period of time doing intense QA validation” before the final is released. Firefox director Mike Beltzner told developers that the Firefox 4 RC1 code represents the code that is “intended” to be shipped as Firefox 4. The company does not expect to have to request another build -- there is a good chance that RC1 in fact will be the final build that is released as Firefox 4.0.

More: http://www.conceivablytech.com/5994/products/first-firefox-4-rc1-builds-posted