Forget Firefox 4.0, the first Beta development milestone for the next iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser is just around the corner.
The browser vendor is confirming that Firefox 5 Beta is right on track for delivery in as little as one week.
If all goes well, Firefox 5 will graduate from the Aurora channel to Beta on May 17th, 2011.
“Official cutover to Beta is May 17th, 2011,” the company
stated. “There are 6 key bugs we are tracking that have to be dealt with prior to May 17th. They will either be resolved or we will decide they are not severe enough to block the merge.”
Firefox 5 hitting Beta this soon after the release of Firefox 4.0 is illustrative of Mozilla’s commitment to speeding up considerably the development and release pace of new major versions of its open source browser.
Essentially, end users should expect Firefox 6 to drop just six weeks after Firefox 5 and every other new Firefox version six weeks after that.
As early as next week, early adopters will get to play with the first Beta of Firefox 5.
Mozilla already released a
trial Firefox 5 Beta, which is just an Aurora Build rebranded as a Beta to allow testers to play with the new channel switcher feature.
“We now have about 37K users on 5.0b1. Volume of users has been increasing on Beta and Aurora since the update went out last week,” Mozilla added.
“Since we have not identified any big stability issues, we have decided to increase the throttle from 50% to 100% to offer the update to more users from the beta pool we are targeting.”
Of course, with Firefox 5 Beta launching, early adopters should also look beyond it to the first Firefox 6 Aurora Build which is scheduled for delivery by the end of May 2011.
The current plan is to have Firefox 5 finalized and offered to end users by June 21st.
UPDATE: Mozilla notes: "the merge date is not necessarily the date users on a particular update channel will see an update available."
This means that testers will not necessarily get Firefox 5 Beta on May 17th, but at a later date. Firefox 5 Beta 1 Trial and Firefox 4.0 Final for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 5 Beta 1 Trial and Firefox 4.0 Final for Mac are available for download here.
Firefox 5 Beta 1 Trial and Firefox 4.0 Final for Linux are available for download here.
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