Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 to Kill Firefox 3.1

Firefox 3.1 is already with one foot in the grave, having failed to move past the Beta embryonic stage. According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 will completely kill off version 3.1 of the open source browser. Per the current plans, the last breath of Firefox 3.1 will be Beta 3, which is planned to ship by the end of this week. Following the availability of Beta 3, the next iteration of Firefox, codenamed Shiretoko, will evolve from version 3.1 to version 3.5 in less than a month. The next development milestone for Shiretoko will be Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, which is currently planned for April 2009.

“Beta 3 will be the last milestone release with the 3.1 version number, and Firefox 3.5b4 will be the following one,” Mozilla's Director of Ecosystem Development Mike Shaver stated. “Mozilla-central's Minefield version will be changed to 3.6pre as a placeholder. For an abundance of clarity: this does not indicate that the next version will be called ‘Firefox 3.6’ when it's shipped. The Gecko version number will remain 1.9.1 on the mozilla-1.9.1 branch, and will remain 1.9.2 on mozilla-central for the foreseeable future.”

Samuel Sidler, Quality Assurance engineer at Mozilla, will be the one who will coordinate the entire transition from Firefox 3.1 to Firefox 3.5, between the Beta 3 and Beta 4 milestones. Today, March 9, 2009, Sidler has already outlined the Firefox3.1/3.5 migration that is currently focused on March 17. This will be the day when Mozilla plans to change the version number on 1.9.1 to 3.5b4pre (3.5 Beta 4), however, the date is not set in stone and it could change. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience lead, indicated that Mozilla still had to resolve some 100 bugs blocking the release of what was at the moment Firefox 3.5.

“The increase in scope represented by TraceMonkey and Private Browsing, plus the sheer volume of work that's gone into everything from video and layout to places and the plugin service make it a larger increment than we believe is reasonable to label ‘.1’. 3.5 will help set expectations better about the amount of awesome that's packed into Shiretoko, and we expect uptake help from that as well. It's important to note that 3.5 represents a better labeling of our *current* scope, and not an indication that we intend to significantly increase this release's scope any further,” Shaver added.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Windows is available here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Linux is available here.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 for Mac OS X is available here.