While Microsoft only managed at the end of an entire year of development for Internet Explorer 8 to promise additional details about IE7's successor at MIX08 in March, and a beta by mid 2008, Mozilla is making headway with the development of Firefox 3.0. In February, users of the open source browser will begin to access the bits for the third beta of Firefox 3.0. As of January 29, the code for Firefox 3.0 Beta has been frozen.

"We took a hard look at the amount of blockers remaining for Beta 3 and decided that we’re still going to do a Beta 3 code freeze tonight, but will be adding at least one more milestone (Beta 3.1?) before moving on to Release Candidate builds," Mozilla explained.

At this point in time, there are in excess of 60 high-priority bugs blocking Firefox 3.0+ or blocking Gecko 1.9+. The code for Firefox 3.0 Beta 3 will remain blocked throughout the coming week. But on the first Monday in February, namely on the 4th, the browser tree will be handed over to the build team in order to produce the first Release Candidates.

"After [the Firefox 3.0 Beta 3] freeze we’ll be using the same process we used for the last beta, holding the tree closed to bake the beta for the rest of the week. During that time we should be focusing on regression spotting and fixing, and all patches must have explicit approval," Mozilla added.

And just in case you were wondering, Beta 3 is not the last development milestone for Firefox 3.0. Due to the large volume of blocker bugs, Mozilla will also deliver Firefox 3.0 Beta 4, although the release date is yet to be determined.

"Our goal is to do a quick turnaround on Firefox 3 Beta 4, but we cannot provide a good estimate until we know the size and scope of blockers remaining after the Beta 3 codefreeze," Mozilla added, asking developers dealing with blocker bugs to estimate the time it will take them to deal with the show-stopping issues.

It still remains to be seen if Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 will be the last development milestone before the RTM stage, but in the meantime, Mozilla will also serve an update to Firefox 2.0 next month. On February 12, 2008, Mozilla is scheduled to release Firefox 2.0.0.12.