14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is working its way to deliver the first beta development milestone of Firefox 3.6., codename Namoroka. The next iteration of the open-source browser won’t have any additional Alpha releases and will advance straight to Beta, with the final release planned for just two months away. At the start of this week, Mozilla noted that the Beta 1 Build for Firefox 3.6 is the next development milestone of Namoroka, indicating that the v3.6 minor update for Firefox is evolving fast toward general availability.
String freeze in common code and browser only took place on September 15th, just to be extended to all aspects of Firefox 3.6 the subsequent day. As far as Mozilla is concerned, the upcoming deadline in the development process of Firefox 3.6 is Beta code freeze. “Right now we're potentially drifting into November for a final release due to [a] number of outstanding blockers,” Mozilla noted on September 16th.
The Beta 1 for Firefox 3.6 was initially planned for availability by the end of September 2009, and with the progress made by Mozilla so far it looks like, by the end of this month, users will be able to test drive the first post-Alpha release of v3.6. Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 was offered to testers in the first half of August 2009, more than a month ago.
On its FTP servers, Mozilla has updated Firefox 3.6 and is currently offering for download 3.6a2-candidates as of September 16th. Earlier this week, Mozilla CEO John Lilly confirmed that Mozilla was pushing for a November release of Firefox 3.6, adding that Firefox 3.7 would follow in the spring of 2010, with Firefox 4.0 planned for the fall of next year.
And as Mozilla is approaching Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, the exo.performance.network managed to provide some good news. According to statistics from approximately 20,000 registered users, Firefox is installed on over 50% of computers in enterprise environments. “That's a pretty amazing measure. I'm skeptical but with 1 billion downloads it's not out of the question that Firefox gets at least occasional use on half of the PCs out there,” commented Asa Dotzler, director of community development, Mozilla.
The latest releases of Firefox are available for download here.