Firefox 11 available for download now, officially.

Afew days back, we talked about Firefox 11, the latest version of the popular browser being available for download unofficially. As with most Firefox releases, the final release binaries are hidden away on the FTP, a few days before the official launch date. The official launch date is here and those wanting to upgrade their browsers can do so, today. There have been some minor issues, which seem to have been rectified. First, there was a critical security bug that needed to be fixed, but that has been done in time. There were worries that the official launch date would be missed due to this security hole being discovered at the last moment. Another issue was Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, where Microsoft releases security updates for their operating systems.

The launch of Firefox 11 was clashing with Patch Tuesday, so Mozilla decided to launch the browser as a manual download only. Once Microsoft is done releasing patches, Mozilla will then enable the auto download feature for the new update. This is likely to take a day or two after which Mozilla will be aware of the impact of Patch Tuesday. This was mentioned in a post by Johnathan Nightingale, Senior Director of Firefox Engineering. There’s also some caution over future Firefox downloads and Mozilla wants to avoid releasing updates on Firefox because of these issues.

The next major Firefox release - version 12 isn’t too far away, the beta is already available for download and the final release is expected to be available for download on the 24th of April 2012, just weeks from now. Those wanting to try out the Beta version of Firefox 12 can find download links here. Firefox 11 brings along a bunch of new features and a ton of bug fixes. The new features, include synchronization features for Google Chrome to users can move settings and bookmarks to Firefox easily. There are also new developer tools, such as the 3D Page Inspector, which allow developers to look at parts of the pages in 3D.