Firefox 3.1 is the successor of Firefox 3.0, and Mozilla is currently cooking the first Alpha version of the next iteration of its open source browser. Pre-Alpha versions of Firefox 3.1 codename Shiretoko are already available for download and testing, and the fully fledged Alpha is right on track for delivery by the end of this month. Damon Sicore, Director of Platform Engineering at Mozilla, pointed to two potential dates for the availability of Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 which could drop at the end of the next week along the Firefox 3.0.1 security and stability update, or the week after that.

"Per our last Gecko meeting, we discussed two potential dates for the one and only 1.9.1 alpha. They were either Thursday, July 17th or Monday, July 21st. I think people were leaning more towards July 21st, but I wanted to open this up for suggestions. Also, we don't expect to be 100% feature complete for the alpha. We do expect to be feature complete for the first beta, which will be mid to late August," Sicore explained.

Now that Firefox 3.0 is widely available to the general public, Mozilla is cooking the next version which is planed for delivery either in the last quarter of this year, or in Q1 2009. With the first beta Build scheduled for the end of August, the development process will not permit Mozilla to ship a major update to Firefox, but only integrate the features and capabilities that were cut out of Firefox 3.0. And version 3.1 will have some rather big shoes to fill when it is made available.

"Mozilla received the official Guinness World Record certificate for the 'largest number of software downloads in 24 hours'. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3! Tristan Nitot, President of Mozilla Europe, accepted the certificate from Gareth Deaves, Records Manager for Internet and Technology at Guinness World Records, on behalf the Firefox Community," revealed Jane Hatton Finette, Director of European Marketing at Mozilla Corporation.

Firefox 3.0 can be downloaded from here.