14 DAY TRIAL // No doubt some testers and early adopters are scratching their heads and asking themselves why aren’t they running the fully fledged Beta of Firefox 3.6 yet. And fact is that Mozilla was supposed to already be serving the Firefox 3.6 Beta bits to participants in the testing program worldwide. Obviously, this is not the case. At the time of writing this article, Firefox 3.6 Beta was still not officially available for download, or otherwise. Actually, Mozilla has delayed the release of the first Beta development milestone for Firefox 3.6. However, the release deadline has only been postponed for a maximum of a couple of days.
According to Mozilla, a developer “noticed that we changed the behavior of the frozen interface (nsIPrefBranch.idl) which means we need to respin. This will delay the beta 1-2 days,” the company estimated. Initially, Firefox 3.6 Beta was planned for availability on October 28, 2009. Add a few days to this date, and testers will most probably get to access, download and install the official Firefox 3.6 Beta on their computers sometime by the end of this month, possibly sooner than later.
But Mozilla did offer users of its open source browser a little something to play with on October 28. Yesterday, the Firefox 3.5.4 and Firefox 3.0.15 security and stability update became available for download. Following the release of the latest refreshes, Mozilla indicated that it planned to offer Firefox 3.5.5 and Firefox 3.0.16 in December of this year.
Of course, the release that most Firefox users are looking to involves the evolution of the version number for the open source browser from 3.5 to 3.6. Designed as a minor update for Firefox 3.5, version 3.6 will tailor the browser to the graphical user interface of Windows 7. Firefox 3.6 is in fact the first third-party browser that plays nice with Windows 7’s Windows Aero GUI advances, including Aero Peek, Thumbnail Preview and JumpLists via the new Taskbar (Superbar).
Firefox 3.5.4 and Firefox 3.0.15 for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 3.5.4 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 3.0.15 for Linux is available for download here.