14 DAY TRIAL // After it had made available for download Gran Paradiso Alpha 6 at the beginning of July, Mozilla was getting ready to deliver the first beta stage of Firefox 3.0. According to the initial milestone schedule for Firefox 3.0, Mozilla planned to offer Gran Paradiso Beta 1 on July 30. However, immediately following the release of Alpha 6, the open source browser moved into a pre 7 Alpha phase, hinting of the company's plans. And this is now official, and confirmed by Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering.
The Foundation's plans for Gran Paradiso have changed. Firefox 3.0 Alpha 7's code freeze is planned for July 25, with the code available at the end of the month. "A milestone schedule with a release every 6 weeks (4 weeks till code freeze from last milestone, 2 weeks of stabilization/build work) seems to work the best. Note that actual tree closures will in practice likely be shorter than 2 weeks if there are not multiple re-spins. Based on this context the proposed schedule is: M7 freeze on July 25, platform feature freeze, this is the "web developer preview release" since it is platform complete. This will be marketed at a higher volume than other alphas to help get wider-scale testing. M8 Freeze on Sept 5, Firefox feature freeze. M9 Freeze on Oct 16 and M Ongoing as needed," Schroepfer revealed.
Gran Paradiso Milestone 7 will be synonymous with Firefox 3.0 Alpha 7, and not the first beta of the browser. Schroepfer explained that quality will come first, and that Firefox 3.0 will be moved into beta once certain standards will be achieved. "We'll switch from Alphas to Betas as soon as we believe Firefox is stable and usable enough for daily browsing for a large number of people. Until we hit this criteria we'll continue to release Alphas on the 6 week cadence above. Criteria: a) Footprint at or below that of 1.8. This is being measured regularly through Talos working set size and through informal dogfooding. b) Most sites should display properly and regression free (from previous major release) c) No known common data loss bugs d) No common hangs or crashes e) No problems with major features in common use cases," Schroepfer added.
Looking at the current schedule, Firefox 3.0 will follow Apple's Safari 3.0 to the market. As of yet, there is no word on the availability of the first milestone for IE8. Still, speculations revealed that Microsoft plans to deliver the first beta for Internet Explorer 8 concomitantly with Windows Vista Service Pack 1. And since the first beta for Vista SP1 will drop next week, it is possible that users will also get a preview of IE8.