Some people were a little surprised when they noticed that they were running version 1.5.0.1 of the Firefox web browser. The surprise stems from the fact that this next version, considered a minor update is still scheduled to ship before the end of the month.

The confusion is caused by the auto-upgrade system. Affected users had installed Firefox 1.5b1 or 1.5b2 and then used the auto-upgrade to move to the 1.5 final release.

"Since you installed a beta and never re-installed Firefox from the full installer your update channel is beta - which means you are willing to run beta versions of Firefox," Mozilla said. "You are, whether you knew it for sure or not, a beta tester."

According to Mozilla's developer center, if this is the case with your install and you wish to only receive the release versions, you can either reinstall Firefox from the full 1.5 installer or by opening the file {firefox install dir}defaultsprefschannel-prefs.js in a text editor and changing line 2 from:

pref("app.update.channel", "beta");

to

pref("app.update.channel", "release");

Then save the file and restart Firefox.

This comes at about the time Firefox 1.5 passed the 20 million downloads mark, Mozilla Corp. announced.