According to Mozilla

Jan 14, 2010 12:56 GMT  ·  By

Mozilla is currently in the last stage of product development for the next iteration of its open source browser. Fact is that the wait for the successor of Firefox 3.5, released in mid-2009, is almost over. In this regard, the final version of Firefox 3.6 could be made available for download for the general public either next week or two weeks from now. After it repeatedly postponed the official launch of Firefox 3.6, initially planned for release in November 2009, Mozilla finally settled for GA by the end of January 2010, and it looks like the developers of the open source browser will manage to live up to their promise.

On January 13th, 2010, Mozilla revealed that it was still working on the specific ship date for Firefox 3.6 Final. However, two proposed dates were under consideration. Firefox 3.6 could drop as early as next week on January 19, Mozilla noted. At the same time, there is an additional general availability deadline proposed for Firefox 3.6, and one that will give Mozilla a tad more elbow room to fine tune the browser. Provided that Firefox 3.6 won’t be offered to end users next week, it could drop on January 26. Both dates are preliminary, and with no details set in stone at this point in time, the actual release deadline might vary.

One thing is certain, Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, indicated that Firefox 3.6 was being prepared for availability sometime in the last two weeks of January. The actual GA deadline can only be pushed back if Mozilla comes across show stopping bugs. Blockers are issues severe enough to catalyze the delay of a certain milestone until they are resolved.

Beltzner shared some good news with the public, indicating that since the launch of Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate no showstoppers were identified. Mozilla made available for download Firefox 3.6 RC at the end of the past week. According to information offered by Beltzner, over 1 million testers grabbed the RC build, and feedback is quite positive.

However, Mozilla did identify one potential bug that could catalyze a RC respin. The problem is currently under evaluation, but if it will indeed qualify as a blocker, Mozilla will offer testers yet another RC development milestone of Firefox 3.6 ahead of the final release.

Firefox 3.6 RC1 (Release Candidate) for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6 RC1 (Release Candidate) for Mac OS X is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6 RC1 (Release Candidate) for Linux is available for download here.

Firefox 3.5.7 and Firefox 3.0.17 are available for download here.