The upcoming stage in the development of the next iteration of Firefox is blocked by a consistent volume of bugs, Mozilla revealed. No less than 17 blockers are stopping Firefox 3.1 from moving onward to Beta 2. On November 10, the conclusion was that the Firefox 3.1, codename Shiretoko, Beta 2 was not ready for build because of the large number of issues affecting the development milestone of the open source browser.

“Despite a lot of hard work, we're still a little bit away from being ready to hand the code for Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 over to the build team at this time. As of this writing, there are 17 bugs (marked blocking with the appropriate TM) that need to be resolved before we can ship,” revealed Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience lead.

Beltzner indicated that no less than ten bugs impact Firefox 3.1 Beta 2, while another seven affect the underlying Gecko 1.9.1 Beta 2 rendering engine. The release of Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 continues to be planned for mid-November 2008; however, considering the number of blockers still unresolved, availability might slip toward the end of the month.

On October 14, 2008, Mozilla offered Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for download. Version 3.1 supersedes Firefox 3.0, released earlier this year. Going forward, Firefox 3.1 will have to go against Internet Explorer 8, which is currently in Beta 2 phase, with the RTW (release to web) reportedly planned by the end of this month.

“The tree spent most of Monday closed due to recurring test failures which we have as yet been unable to conclusively link to any single checkin. As a result some, but not a lot, of progress was made on the outstanding bugs for Beta 2. Patches are ready to land, we just need a tree that can take them,” Beltzner added.

For the time being, Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 is available for download here.