Build 1

Oct 14, 2009 16:57 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla is starting to deliver the first taste of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1. Build 1 of the development milestone is now available for download via the Mozilla FTP servers, but be warned it is nothing more than a nightly build. This means that it is not the fully fledged Beta of Firefox 3.6 that was initially expected this week, but which was ultimately pushed back due to a range of bugs/blockers that needed to be resolved before the open-source browser could advance to the next stage in its development.

In fact, at the time of this article, Mozilla was offering only the source code for Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 candidates. However, the good news is that Firefox 3.6 Beta is now code frozen. According to Mozilla, all blockers that were keeping version 3.6 from reaching Beta stage have been resolved. In this context, Firefox 3.6 is now right on track for availability, come next week.

Mozilla is already offering the Beta 1 builds for download to testers. October 14th is a date also synonymous with the debut of the QA testing phase. Although it said that it would deliver the final Beta of Firefox 3.6 on October 15th, this will not be the case. Because of the bugs that still affected the release, the fully-fledged Beta has been postponed until a day ahead of Windows 7 General Availability, namely October 21st.

Firefox 3.5 was planned for release to web in November 2009. Mozilla might just make it, and then again, the browser could slip into December. Between Beta and the final development milestone, Mozilla will deliver at least one Release Candidate. There’s no telling at this point in time when exactly Firefox 3.6 RC will be offered to testers; however, beta 1 is just around the corner.

The latest releases of Firefox for Windows are available for download here.