14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is preparing to launch a new Beta release of the next major version of its open source browser, Firefox 7.
Early adopters have already had the chance to take Firefox 7 Beta out for a spin over the last three weeks, and see how the development milestone improved with a few updates.
There have been no less than four refreshes to the original Firefox 7 Beta, and by the looks of it, a few more are on their way.
Soon enough, testers will be able to download Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 5, or Firefox 7.0.b5. Mozilla has yet to provide a specific availability deadline, but my bet is that early adopters will get it soon enough.
For the time being, a preview release of Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 5 is available for download from Mozilla’s FTP servers. This is not the fully-fledged fifth update to the Beta of Firefox 6’s successor, but only a candidate release.
However, testers won’t need to be patient for very long. The open source browser vendor is in fact planning to release the Firefox 7 Beta Refresh 5 ahead of this weekend, which means later today or tomorrow.
Provided that nothing goes wrong, the update to Firefox 7 Beta will ship soon enough to all testers. But what’s really interesting about this particular release is the fact that with three weeks passed since Firefox 7 graduated to Beta, there are just as many left until the final release will be offered to end users.
The plan is to wrap up Firefox 7 and have it launch by the end of September 2011. Since the deliveries of Firefox 5 and Firefox 6 have been right on time, there’s really no reason why not to expect Firefox 7 to become available six weeks after its predecessor.
Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Mac are available for download here.