Well then, since you seem to think you know what is relevant, can you tell us what is relevant?
The fact that the code- which will, and has been used to compile the nightly builds -(which can be freely downloaded and checked in this matter via CVS) has changed since the "implied" "final" build. So unless the final version is actually a regression from whatever is in the stable source tree at the time it's not going to be the same.
My comment:
How "finished" the development team feels a product is is about the most irrelevant factor in deciding wether a product goes RTM that it's laughable it was even quoted.
First, I should point out I was using "RTM" rather loosely. It's an open source project that has stable builds being compiled daily. Any one of those can be considered "released to manufacturing" since for Open Source "released to manufacturing" means "available on the internet" Now, a better definition in this case would be that it is linked to by the main firefox site and perhaps even has updated debian and RPM repositories (or at least, updates to said repositories pending).
The reason it's relevant is that feelings about products or code or software are redundant; even what said developers think about a product don't matter. Why?
Because when you work on a project long enough, you get immersed in a reality distortion field. Now to be fair in the case of firefox some unsuspecting users have gotten swept up in that same field of distortion. Basically, it makes the product seem better then it really is. This wouldn't be so bad, except that the fictitious glorification of the software in their eyes can get to a point where it blots out any bugs; they will reason "well, we don't really need to fix bug X, because how can anybody have a problem when we have badass killer features like A,B, and C?"
That's another thing- the quote was entirely misattributed. What happens in software development is determined more or less by the various testers of the product; wether they be in-house employees hired for that purpose or a public beta. That is exactly what happened with FF4; they released it as a beta. Testers tested it- found problems, bugs were actually triaged (I'm LOOKING AT YOU GOOGLE CHROME. I'm going to STOP submitting bug reports if your developers are going to close the bugs and tagging them with "will not fix" which wouldn't be so bad if the bug wasn't about your incorrect implementation of a standard DOM feature; and not even something basic either, I mean, this was something IE6 did correctly that google chrome doesn't. And my report wasn't "DUH DIS HERE PAGE NO WORKEE YOU FIX NAOW!" It included quite a lot of what I felt was helpful information, such as DOM layout before and after from the DOM inspector.... But that is all rather tangential) anyway, testers tested the beta's of FF4, submitted bugs, those bugs were fixed, sorted, regression tested, etc, and slowly the number of bug reports dwindled and the number of showstoppers dramatically slowed down (arguably this could also be a result of people simply losing interest in the beta, but at least it couldn't be because their bug reports were being downright ignored). It was then that the development team (which again, is only a relatively small fraction of all FF developers/contributors) "felt" that it was ready for release. The decision was made by the testers, not by the development team, and they don't "feel" that way insomuch as they can sense that the testers felt that way.
