Mozilla has made an important step forward toward the finish line for Firefox 3.0, its next generation open source browser. The code for the first Release Candidate of Firefox 3.0 is now complete at over a month since the availability of the previous development milestone of the browser. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 was released on April 5, 2008, and to this date it is the last finalized beta testing build. On April 8, Mozilla announced that the browser's tree was entering lockdown for the Release Candidate 1 stage of Firefox 3.0, but failed to provide a timetable for RC1's launch. As of May 10, Mozilla has wrapped up with the code for Firefox 3.0 RC1 and pointed out that it was preparing to offer the new Build.

"We are code complete for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). New nightly builds are available - if you are a nightly tester/Minefield user you can help test these builds by selecting "Check for Updates" from your help menu. Assuming no new issues are found today the build team will start official prep work for Release Candidate 1 (RC1) [on May 11]. QA will start their extensive RC1 test pass on Monday, [May 12]", Mozilla stated.

Firefox 3.0 was initially planned for launch by the end of 2007. The quality of the browser as it inched forward from one development milestone to another was responsible for postponing general availability all the way to mid 2008. In fact the final bits for Firefox 3.0 are expected to drop by the end of June, with a strong possibility that RC1 will be the last development milestone for the successor of Firefox 2.0.

"If all goes well we should have the Release Candidate publicly available in late May. RC1 is intended for wider scale public testing. Our 1.2M+ active beta users will automatically get updated to RC1 when it is released. If no new showstopper issues are found in RC1 it will become Firefox 3 final. If we find any critical issues we will continue to release new Release Candidates until we are ready for final ship", Mozilla added.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 can be downloaded from here.