14 DAY TRIAL // Making headway with the development of the next generation of its open source browser, Mozilla has made available for download the next development milestone for Firefox 3.0. At the beginning of March, Firefox 3.0 moved to Beta 4, marking in this manner the twelfth developer milestone for the product. But even before Beta 4 shipped, Mozilla announced that a subsequent beta build would follow, scheduling the code freeze for March 18, and pointing to the end of the month for the delivery of the next testing iteration. Well, the wait is now over, and Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 is available for download.
Mozilla has not announced Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 officially, but the bits have gone live on the FTP servers and we managed to grab them for you. The first Release Candidates for Firefox 3.0 beta 5 shipped as early as March 27, as nightly builds signaling the proximity of the final Beta. As of April 1, 2008, Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 has been completed and Mozilla has begun pushing Build download files to mirrors. Later on today, April 2, Mozilla will also revamp the download page on its servers in order to accommodate Firefox 3.0 Beta 5.
The release of Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 comes on the heels of a landmark moment for Mozilla, the 10-year anniversary. "March 31, 1998 is the date that Mozilla was officially launched. It's the date the first Mozilla code became publicly available under the terms of an official open source license and a governing body for the project - the Mozilla Organization - began its public work. It's always been known in Mozilla parlance as '3/31.' We'll be celebrating Mozilla's 10-year anniversary throughout 2008," said Mitchell Baker, the Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation.
And at the end of March, good news simply poured in for Mozilla. According to Forrester (via Enterprise Desktop And Web 2.0/SaaS Platform Trends, 2007), Firefox accounted for more than 18% of the browser market in terms of the corporate environments at the end of 2007. But Firefox is eroding Internet Explorer's install base on the end users' front as well, with a share just short of 18% at the end of March 2008, according to data made available by Net Applications. The final version of Firefox 3.0 is expected to drop by the end of June 2008.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Linux is here. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Mac OS X is here.