Since January 21st

Jan 29, 2010 18:41 GMT  ·  By

At just a little over a week since release, the latest iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser was downloaded in excess of 22.6 million times, closing in to 22.7 downloads. However, Mozilla is not the one to rest on its laurels. In fact, the company is hard at work cooking the first stability and security update for Firefox 3.6. But while the first refresh should be version 3.6.1, the update that Mozilla plans to deliver next month will be 3.6.2.

Firefox 3.6.2 “will be built off Gecko 1.9.2.2,” Mozilla revealed, indicating that it is considering to “potentially skip the version number of Firefox 3.6.1 in order to stay in sync with platform. [And that it was]hoping for small, mid-February release, co-inciding with Firefox 3.0.18/3.5.8.”

While earlier this week, skipping 3.6.1 was only a possibility, it appears that it has since become reality, as Mozilla was “evaluating the bugs that missed the release candidate but are safe and simple” for Firefox 3.6.2 on January 27th, revealing that only a couple of high priority fixes had been identified. At the same time, the company reiterated its intention to synchronize the release of Firefox 3.6.2 with those of Firefox 3.0.18 / Firefox 3.5.8. The currently launch deadline scheduled for Firefox 3.0.18 and Firefox 3.5.8 is February 16th.

In the meantime, the next version of Firefox is also being built. Mozilla is cooking Firefox codename Lorentz with very early development builds already available for download to testers via the company’s FPT servers. As far as Lorentz is concerned, on January 27th, Mozilla noted that the “out of process plugins was being stabilized on mozilla-central. The project branch was ready for checkins and building nightlies [and that] once stable on trunk, we'll begin the mozilla-1.9.2 backport using this project branch.”

Firefox 3.6 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Final for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Final for Linux is available for download here.