No more Betas for Firefox 3.0, according to Mozilla. Beta 5 was in fact the last beta for the next iteration of the open source browser. Mozilla is making headway with the development of Firefox 3.0 and has now entered a new stage in the building of the browser. While Beta 5 will not by any counts be the last development milestone of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla will no longer use the Beta label for any of its future releases of the browser. This because Firefox 3.0 has entered the process designed to produce the first Release Candidate.

"The [code] tree entered a lockdown period in preparation for delivering Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1. We’ll be using the same process that has been used for the past betas. The blocker lists will be driven to zero, and only patches with explicit approval will be allowed to land in order to more tightly control potential for regressions. After taking the final blocker, we will likely enter a short bake period before handing over to build. The tree rules have been updated to reflect that at this time the only patches that may land are: patches with approval1.9+ and patches that do not affect the Firefox build (tests, NPOTB changes)," Mozilla revealed.

The fact that Firefox 3.0 is moving forward with this new step designed to deliver the first Release Candidate is a clear illustration that the open source browser is in the final stages of cooking. At this point in time, Mozilla failed to deliver a deadline for the availability of Firefox 3.0 RC1, however, judging by the pace at which Beta builds were shipped, the next version could drop by the end of this month.

The number of bugs blocking the Release Candidate has been reduced to 114 official issues, but there are additional problems that will have to be dealt with before the finalization of the product. Mozilla currently plans to drop the final Firefox 3.0 by the end of June 2008.

For the time being, you will be able to download Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Windows from here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Linux is here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 for Mac OS X is here.