We finally hit zero blockers, and stayed there, long enough that Beltzner felt it was safe to start building FF4.0rc1. So, today, at 12:09PST, beltzner sent the “go to build” email, and I took this picture.

At this point, some of the builds are already handed to QA, and we’ll have the rest to QA by first thing in the (PST) morning. You can feel the excitement in corridors and in irc channels.

Of course, this close to the finish line, it’s easy to get tempted to rush things, to take a shortcut to do things quickly – but that would only invite problems. Instead, we’re doing what we’ve done for every release – calmly, quietly, confidently, following a process that we’ve been refining and testing with every alpha, beta and security-release leading up to today.

(Oh, by the way, today we’re also calmly doing a chemspill Firefox 3.6.15 at the same time!)

This poster is just perfectly appropriate.