14 DAY TRIAL // The next major version of Firefox is one step closer to being wrapped up, with the last development milestone (hopefully), now available to early adopters for testing. Mozilla just released a new Firefox 5 Beta Build for download, pointing out that it’s extremely close to finishing the successor of Firefox 4.0.
If all continues to go well, the open source browser vendor will make Firefox 5 Final available for download on June 21, 2011, less than two weeks from now.
“In the last week, we’ve taken 20 more changesets into the [Firefox 5] Beta, including half a dozen crash fixes, several security improvements, and the removal of the channel changing UI,” Mozilla said.
“We completed what we hope is the final Beta build. It’ll be QA’d and delivered to our Beta channel audience soon, and if no other major issues are found by those groups, this changeset will be delivered to our nearly half a billion Release channel users.”
In parallel with Firefox 5 Beta, early adopters can also test the next version of Firefox and then the next iteration after that.
Firefox 6 is currently in Aurora and will graduate to the Beta Channel sometime after Firefox 5 will be released to end users later this month.
It appears that the development process for Firefox 6 Aurora is not going as fast as it should and the release of Firefox 6 Beta might be pushed back a tad.
“The [Firefox 6] Aurora channel is cranking along at a pretty good pace, though evaluations of tracking nominations and patch approvals are at tad bit slower than we’d like [these] weeks thanks to some attention we diverted to [Firefox 5] Beta. But with just about a month to go before Aurora is uplifted to Beta, we should be OK with this small delay,” Mozilla said.
And then there’s Firefox 7. Available through the Nightly Channel, Firefox 7 is still very early on in the development process.
“There’s been a lot of activity on [Firefox 7] mozilla-central in the last week, almost 300 changesets resulting in about 120 resolved bugs. This brings the total for mozilla-central up to about 650 changesets yielding 450 new features and fixes,” Mozilla revealed.
Firefox 5 Beta for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 5 Beta for Mac is available for
download here.
Firefox 5 Beta for Linux is available for
download here.
Firefox 6 Aurora for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 6 Aurora for Mac is available for download here.
Firefox 6 Aurora for Linux is available for download here.