Ten critical bugs could hold up Firefox 3

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 27 May 2008 at 15:28

Mozilla is considering a second Release Candidate of Firefox 3 after the discovery of 10 critical bugs in the new browser.

In a post published on a Mozilla developers' forum, vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer admits a second Release Candidate could be necessary.

"If we need to do an RC2 they'll be ready to go - if we ship RC1 we can get them in the 3.0.1," he says of the bugs.

"We want to keep this to critical bugs only (e.g. common crashes, severe breakage of major functionality, etc) - if we have to do an RC2 the test/feedback cycle will be shorter than a dot release," he adds.

Mozilla has publicly stated the browser will be launched in June, giving it little more than a month to fix the bugs or witness the deadline slip. However, the open-source developer is hardly being put under pressure by Microsoft, which is still at beta 1 with Internet Explorer 8.

Firefox 3 has already been through a thorough testing process, which saw five different betas of the next-generation browser.

Among the bugs listed are five that cause the browser to crash in a variety of scenarios.