Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 Just Around the Corner

Mozilla is gearing up for the release of the first Beta for Firefox 3.6. The minor update to Firefox 3.5, which shipped earlier this year, is planned to advance from Alpha to Beta stage as soon as next week. Yesterday, October 6th, 2009, Mozilla reached an important milestone, namely the code freeze of Firefox 3.6, a move that would indicate that the fully fledged Beta release could indeed be made available for download no later than the coming week.

Mozilla has however derailed a tad from the initially proposed schedule for the availability of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1. Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's Director of Firefox, revealed at the end of September that code freeze was planned for October 5th via The Register. In this regard, Mozilla was looking to start building the first Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 builds on October 6th. This is obviously not the case since code freeze was postponed to October 6th.

At the start of this week Mozilla had identified no less than 31 blockers, namely bugs considered show-stoppers, capable of postponing the evolution of Firefox 3.6 to Beta phase. However, only 10 of those blockers did not have fixes at that time. Beltzner was skeptical whether the October 6 code freeze deadline was realistic or not because of the 10 bugs that Mozilla had to fix in order to advance Firefox 3.6 to Beta 1.

However, according to Damon Sicore, Sr. Director of Engineering at Mozilla, the October 6 code freeze was given the green light. “We decided that it was reasonable to freeze for beta tonight (11/6) as soon as the last P1 blocker was landed. (…)There's still a bit of churn in other JS (JavaScript) bugs, but I haven't encountered any show stoppers,” he noted.

Realistically speaking, Mozilla won’t be able to release Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 on October 13th, as was initially planned. Still, the first Beta for the successor of Firefox 3.5 is close, just around the corner. All indications point that Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 will be made available for download next week. The final release of Firefox 3.6 will come in November of this year and will be followed by Firefox 3.7 in early 2010.

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