It’s now official, the final release of Firefox 3.6, the next iteration of the open source browser from Mozilla has slipped into the coming year. Users that have so far been holding their breaths for the delivery of Firefox 3.6, codename Namoroka, might as well exhale now, as they will need to exercise their patience a tad longer. Although users of Mozilla’s open source browser were already supposed to be running the final release of Firefox 3.6, fact is that they will only be able to do so in early 2010. And in fact, at this point in time, Mozilla isn’t offering a specific deadline for the general availability of Firefox 3.6, and is only pointing users to early 2010 for the time when the downloads are scheduled to go live.

"Mozilla released a fifth version of Firefox 3.6 to its more than 600,000 beta users as part of its continuing program to gather feedback and get fixes into the hands of the people evaluating the preview," said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, to ComputerWorld. "We expect to be able to issue a release candidate before the end of this year, but we'll likely hold off on the official release until early in the new year."

The initial plan was to have Firefox 3.6 wrapped up by the end of November 2009, approximately one month after the public launch of Windows 7. However, various blockers prevented Mozilla from graduating the successor of Firefox 3.5 to Beta and subsequently to Release Candidate stage.

Because of show stopping bugs, issues severe enough to prevent the browser from being finalized and released to the public, Mozilla ended up pushing the final release of Firefox 3.6 in December 2009. But with Christmas just days away, the company has yet to produce the first RC development milestone, and continues to be far from finalizing version 3.6.

Just the past week, Firefox 3.6 Beta 5, or the fifth revision to the first and only Beta, whichever way suits you best, was made available for download. With the advent of Beta 5, Mozilla fixed in excess of 100 bugs that had survived Beta 4. Still, if all goes well, testers might get to download and play with Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate (RC) by the end of 2009.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Mac OS X is available for download here.

Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 (Beta revision 5) for Linux is available for download here.