At least not yet

Nov 8, 2007 07:44 GMT  ·  By

No Beta 1 of Firefox 3, codenamed Gran Paradiso for you. At least not yet. This is the official position from Mozilla following the release of what was erroneously interpreted as the first fully fledged beta for the next version of its open source browser. The variant of Firefox 3.0 that was made available for download under the label of Beta 1, is in fact nothing more than a release candidate for the first beta stage of the product. The fact of the matter is that it is the last release candidate, but this still does nothing to change the fact that it is only a preview of Gran Paradiso Beta 1. However, at this point in time, the nightly build that is synonymous with the last RC for Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 also points to the imminence of Gran Paradiso moving away from the Alpha status.

"You may have been redirected here while looking for the Firefox 3 Beta. We're sad to say that it's not actually ready yet. The last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It's extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it's motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems: 1) the release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group; 2) we haven't completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and 3) these builds aren't being mirrored properly on our servers", reads a message from Mozilla.

Towards the end of September, the last Alpha milestone of Gran Paradiso was made available for download. Firefox 3.0 Alpha 8 brought to the table modifications to the graphical user interface and built-in malware protection. On October 25, Mozilla celebrated one year since the launch of Firefox 2.0, while still hard at work on in excess of 600 bugs that were blocking Firefox 3.0 at the time. Now, Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 is so close you can actually taste it. And you can have a taste by downloading the Release Candidate for Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 right here on Softpedia. Just look for the Beta 1 tag and you will be fine. Word from Mozilla is that the release of the actual beta of Firefox 3.0 is just around the corner. This is of course more than Microsoft is doing with Internet Explorer 8. There is still little to no word about the next version of IE, at more than a year now since the availability of Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006, for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.