Jul 22, 2011 15:25 GMT  ·  By

The third refresh to Firefox 6 Beta is coming, but is not quite here yet. But, customers can still download a preview of the release and get a taste of what’s coming in the fully-fledged Beta. Firefox 6.0b3-candidates are now live and available for download through Mozilla’s FTP servers, when early adopters can grab them.

I need to emphasize that these 6.0b3-candidates are only previews of the upcoming Firefox 6 Beta release, and not the fully-fledged Beta.

Since they’re nightly Builds, the candidate releases should only be used by early adopters for testing purposes only.

The much larger Beta audience testing the latest Firefox 6 bits from the Beta Channel should wait for the official release from Mozilla, and not make the jump to this preview.

According to information made available by the open source browser vendor, the wait will be quite short.

Mozilla is in fact planning to launch the third refresh to Firefox 6 Beta sometime by the end of this week, possibly as soon as later today or tomorrow.

The merge deadline for Firefox 6 is August 16th, 2011. At that time, the successor of Firefox 5 will be all but wrapped up.

However, another aspect that needs underlining, August 16 is just the merge date for Firefox 6 to graduate to the Release Channel, and not the actual launch deadline.

While end users will have to wait a few more days after August 16 for the final Firefox 6, this date will also bring with its Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 8 Aurora.

At the same time, Mozilla will start working on Firefox 9. The company intends to ship Firefox 6, Firefox 7 and Firefox 8 by the end of 2011, and Firefox 9 soon after. As previous revealed, the plan is to have new versions of Firefox succeed one another every six weeks.

Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Windows are available for download here.

Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Mac are available for download here.