14 DAY TRIAL // Hot on the heels of the Firefox 3.5.7 and Firefox 3.0.17 security and stability updates, Mozilla made available for download the first taste of Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate. As of today, January 6th, 2010 Firefox 3.6 RC Build 1 is live and up for grabs via the company’s FTP servers. Users should however be aware of the fact that this is not the fully-fledged RC of Firefox 3.6, codenamed Namoroka, but instead only a candidate development build. In this regard, Mozilla has yet to work in order to produce the Release Candidate (RC) development milestone for Firefox 3.6, but judging from the progress made, it shouldn’t take too long now.
“Just wanted to follow up to let everyone know that after months of development, we've started builds for Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate builds. We're pretty excited,” noted Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox at Mozilla, announcing the release.
Fact is that Firefox 3.6 RC is just around the corner. Mozilla has yet to set a specific availability deadline for the development milestone, but it is certainly heading in the right direction. Although the final version of Firefox 3.6 was initially planned for launch ahead of the end of 2009, more specifically in November, it was ahead of the holidays that Mozilla offered testers Firefox 3.6 Beta 5.
And it was with Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 that Mozilla reached the number of testers it required for the Beta stage of the next iteration of its open source browser. Over the holidays, Firefox 3.6 was used by approximately 800,000 testers, and out of the about 20 bugs that were nominated through the holidays, Mozilla managed to identify a few new code blockers.
Ahead of launching the preview version of Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate, Mozilla noted that it had to deal with one remaining JavaScript blocker. It looks like the bug was resolved, since the Firefox 3.6 RC Build 1 was made available for download.
“This is the point where people start asking me about "oh, but what about this patch that didn't make it in?" That's a fine thing to ask, and soon enough I'll be filing bugs to get new flags created for the inevitable Firefox 3.6.1. In the meantime, if there's a patch you want considered for the dreaded status of "RC ridealong," please do so by sending me or another driver private email. Be sure to plead your case clearly: why do we need it? How do you know that it won't cause further performance or functional regressions? How long has it been baking on trunk with tests?” Beltzner asked.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.5.7 and Firefox 3.0.17 are available for download here.