The First Builds of Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) Are Live

Mozilla has entered the last stage in the development of Firefox 3.0 before it ships the gold version of the browser. The Release Candidate 1 milestone on May 16, 2008, signaled the proximity of Firefox 3.0 to the finish line, and had a chance at being the build which would evolve directly to the RTM phase. Still, end users will have to wait for the Release Candidate 2 version to deal with the issues which survived RC1 before getting their hands on the successor of Firefox 2.0. With RC2 delivering only a superficial impact on the development process, it is clear that the wait for Firefox 3.0 will not by prolonged beyond the deadline set for mid-June. In fact, the first preliminary versions of Firefox 3.0 RC 2 are now live and available for download from Mozilla's FTP servers.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's User Experience Lead, explained on May 27 that Mozilla had found sufficient arguments to justify a bump in quality via RC2 ahead of shipping Firefox 3.0. Beltzner added that the majority of the problems planned for fixing in RC2 had already been dealt with. However, Mozilla would not accept any new patches beyond those highlighted for RC2, in an effort to meet its mid-June delivery date. On May 30, Mozilla started offering the first RC2 build candidates for a test day of the current build. If all goes according to plan, the fully-fledged Firefox 3.0 RC2 will be dropped no later than June 6.

Of course that the nightly builds of RC2 are designed for testing purposes only, even though the candidate versions are actually the very first of the final Firefox 3.0. At this point in time, Mozilla indicated that it would go straight from RC2 to the RTM build, aiming for no less than a record five million and above downloads in the first 24 hours since the launch.

Non-testers are advised to stick to Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) available for download here until next week.