14 DAY TRIAL // On May 27, 2008, Mozilla is scheduled to decide whether it will take Firefox 3.0 to Release Candidate 2 stage. Until the end of the past week, the focus was placed on collecting feedback for the current release of the open source browser, namely RC1. Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 went live on May 16, with Mozilla indicating that there was a strong chance for the development milestone to be synonymous with the gold build of the browser. However, this aspect is yet to be determined, and is connected intimately with the tester feedback for RC1.
"We will make the go/no-go decision on an RC2 Tuesday of next week once we've wrapped all testing and evaluated feedback. This is just a set of speculative check-ins to reduce the time needed for an RC2 or 3.0.1 if we needed one," stated Mike Schroepfer, vice president of Engineering at Mozilla.
According to Schroepfer, following user feedback, Mozilla has identified a total of 10 bugs that have the potential of being show stoppers. While the bugs could be addressed before the finalization of next iteration of the open source browser, there is also a possibility that Mozilla could ship Firefox 3.0 with RC1 as the final development release, and focus on the issues in the first update for the browser. "If we need to do an RC2 they'll be ready to go - if we ship RC1 we can get them in the 3.0.1," Schroepfer added.
Either way, Mozilla plans to drop Firefox 3.0 by the end of June. In this context, choosing to go to RC2 means that the next version of Firefox, designed as the successor of Firefox 2.0, could slip from its initial set delivery deadline. However, Mozilla has yet to decide the immediate fate of Firefox 3.0, as the browser lingers between RC2 and the gold build.
Firefox 3.0 RC1 is available for download here.