14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is getting ready to release a new development milestone of Firefox 3.6. And it appears that the upcoming testing build won’t graduate the next version of the open source browser to Release Candidate stage. According to Mozilla, a new Beta release, the fifth one, is currently cooking and being readied for availability. Although the company hasn’t said anything officially, it is already offering testers a taste of Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 via its FTP servers, although, at the time of this article, the development milestone was not yet ready for public release.
As of the end of last week, testers have been able to grab a Candidate of Firefox 3.6 Beta 5. Labeled Firefox 3.6b5-candidates build1, the bits are nothing more than a nightly release. Still, the signal Mozilla is sending is that the fully-fledged Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 isn’t that far off in the distance. On December 1st, 2009, Mozilla noted “Firefox 3.6 Beta - 500,000 active daily users (though only 50% are on the latest beta [namely Beta 4]). Need to get to 650,000 to be able to map stability data onto the general population.”
It is important to note that at the start of this month Mozilla was planning to offer Firefox 3.6 RC by the end of the past week. Obviously, this wasn’t the case, and at this point in the development of version 3.6 of Firefox, show-stopping bugs are solely responsible for delaying the Release Candidate. “Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate - there are 18 code blockers remaining - goal is to get to RC build this week,” Mozilla stated on December 1st.
Another Beta and the further delay of RC can jeopardize the initially set launch date for Firefox 3.5’s successor. Last time it talked about the release, Mozilla emphasized that it was still pushing to have Firefox 3.6 delivered by the end of 2009. However, considering the necessity to attract another hundred thousand testers, as well as to deal with any remaining blockers, a more realist release deadline for version 3.6 is in 2010. Mozilla has yet to confirm officially that Firefox 3.6 has slipped into early 2010.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Mac OS X is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6 Beta 4 for Linux is available for download here.