Firefox 3.0 Release Schedule UpdateFirefox 3.0 Release Schedule Update

In a previous post, I mentioned that we would probably see a Firefox 3.0 release candidate before the end of the month. Based on a senior Mozilla developer's recent remarks, that estimate looks to be right on track.Officially, Mozilla won't commit to a firm date for issuing a Firefox 3.0 release candidate. Unofficially, however, here is what Mozilla Corp. VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer had to say in a blog entry posted last Saturday: Thanks to all the hard work of the Mozilla community as of 9:15 AM PDT today we are code complete for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1). New nightly builds are available - if you are a nightly tester/Minefield user you can help test these builds by selecting Check for Updates from your help menu.

Assuming no new issues are found today the build team will start official prep work for Release Candidate 1 (RC1) tomorrow. QA will start their extensive RC1 test pass on Monday. If all goes well we should have the Release Candidate publicly available in late May.

RC1 is intended for wider scale public testing. Our 1.2M+ active beta users will automatically get updated to RC1 when it is released. If no new showstopper issues are found in RC1 it will become Firefox 3 final. If we find any critical issues we will continue to release new Release Candidates until we are ready for final ship.

As I mentioned previously, there are a lot of under-the-hood changes baked into Firefox 3.0. Bugs, and bug-related delays, are absolutely inevitable; it would not be surprising to see Mozilla run through two or three release candidates to deal with any bugs that turn up during the QA process.

Having said that, now is a great time to take Firefox 3.0 for a test spin if you're the curious type -- and, of course, assuming the word "backup" is in your IT vocabulary.

On a related note: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has been running a widely-used JavaScript benchmark to test Firefox 3.0 pre-releases against both the current Firefox release and competing browsers, including the latest beta releases of Opera and Internet Explorer. His benchmarking results are good news no matter which browser you prefer, but they are especially impressive for the last couple of Firefox 3.0 betas. The new version of the Gecko page-rendering engine that will power Firefox 3.0 has been a long time in the making, but it looks to be well worth the wait.