3.6b2-candidates

Nov 9, 2009 18:31 GMT  ·  By

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 was made available for download at the end of October 2009, and, immediately after launch, Mozilla indicated that it planned to aggressively update the development build in its race to hit the Release Candidate milestone. On Monday, 9th, 2009, Mozilla made available for download a fresh release of Firefox 3.6 Beta. Coincidentally, October 9th is also the fifth anniversary of the open source Firefox browser. The latest bits offered to testers are a nightly release, and labeled 3.6b2-candidates, which would essentially point to a second Beta for Firefox 3.6 that isn’t a mark Mozilla is aiming to hit, as it is in fact laboring to go straight to Release Candidate.

While the 3.6b2-candidates are as real as possible, and available for download through the company’s FTP servers, Mozilla has made no plans public related to a potential Firefox 3.6 Beta 2 release. However, the first Beta of Firefox 3.6 will get a refresh this week. Labeled Firefox 3.6 Beta revision 2, the refresh will be pushed as a minor update to current testers of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1.

“Last week at the development and delivery meetings we decided to issue frequent updates to Firefox 3.6 Beta users on that update channel; aiming for the first update to be this week with: DLL component directory lockdown and blacklisting patch; syntax changes for CSS gradients; cycle-collector patch to stop cycle collection instead of crashing,” Mozilla revealed.

Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate (RC) will be made available for download by the end of this month, and Mozilla is planning to offer the final version of codename Namoroka in mid-December 2009, certainly before the holidays. In this regard, Firefox 3.6 will be the browser release that is at the apex of development for Mozilla when it comes down to the evolution of its open source browser.

“Five years ago today, Mozilla launched Firefox 1.0 with belief that, as the most significant social and technological development of our time, the Internet is a public resource that must remain open and accessible to all. Within the first four days of launch, more than 1 million people had downloaded a brand new browsing experience,” Mozilla’s Melissa Shapiro revealed. “In just five years, that number has swelled to over 330 million users worldwide; almost a quarter of Internet users worldwide choose Firefox. Today, Firefox ships in more than 70 languages and offers users more than 7,000 add-ons to help customize their browsing experience.”

Firefox 3.6 Beta (revision 1) for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta (revision 1) for Mac OS X is available for download here