14 DAY TRIAL // At the start of this week, early adopters of the next iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser have been able to download pre-release variants of an update to the first Beta build of codename Namoroka since the start of this week. Labeled 3.6b2-candidates, the refresh to Firefox 3.6 Beta went live on Monday October 9th, and have been graduated to a full Beta release soon after. At the time of this article, testers are able to download what Mozilla refers to as the Firefox 3.6 Beta refresh.
“Beta 2 refresh shipping: DLL blacklisting patch; syntax changes for CSS gradients; cycle-collector patch to stop cycle collection instead of crashing; over 190 other changes on mozilla-1.9.2 since we shipped first beta,” Mozilla revealed.
Firefox 3.6 Beta was released on Friday, Oct 30th, and in a little over a week the development milestone was already used by in excess of 250,000 users on a daily basis. Mozilla pointed out that it would go straight from Beta to the Release Candidate milestone, but that it would make available interim updates to the first and only Beta version of Firefox 3.6.
In this regard, even though the latest release is labeled 3.6b2, it is not Firefox 3.6 Beta 2. Instead, the latest bits from Mozilla are actually Firefox 3.6 Beta revision 2, and considered as a minor update to Beta 1. And there is at least another Firefox 3.6 revision coming. “Next refresh hoping to come soon with DLL component directory lockdown & whitelist,” Mozilla explained.
The first Release Candidate of Firefox 3.6 is planned for availability later this month, around November 26th. Mozilla will deliver only one RC development build, and will offer the final version of Firefox 3.6 in mid-December 2009, provided that no blocker will be found. Show-stopping bugs, namely issues severe enough to postpone a release, were responsible for Firefox 3.6 Beta being delayed until the end of October in the first place.
Firefox 3.6 Beta Refresh (revision 2) for Windows is available for download here. Firefox 3.6 Beta Refresh (revision 2) for Linux is available for download here.