Monkey mischief delays Firefox 3.1 beta

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 30 Jan 2009 at 15:07

The third beta of Firefox 3.1 looks likely to miss its scheduled release date, as Mozilla struggles to squash problematic bugs in its TraceMonkey rendering engine.

The company has discovered 18 bugs in TraceMonkey, with 15 of them described as priority one blockers which if unresolved are serious enough to prevent the release of the beta.

"I can't tell you that we're 100% confident that we will hit quarter one," writes director of Firefox Mike Beltzner in the meeting notes. "At this time, we don't have a good estimate for when we'll be done. Many of the bugs are proving to be tricky and complicated to fully resolve."

Mozilla is making a big deal of TraceMonkey, which it claims can boost Javascript performance in Firefox 3.1 by up to three times that of past releases. However, the implementation of the new rendering engine has brought a number of delays to the release of the Firefox 3.1 beta.

Indeed, the third beta was only added to the schedule last November, when Mozilla decided that features such as private browsing and TraceMonkey needed more time to bake. This was followed by an announcement earlier this month that beta three would be delayed by a week as the company grappled with outstanding bugs.

Mozilla will be desperately hoping not to lose momentum with continued delays, especially with Internet Explorer breathing down its neck. Microsoft recently unveiled the release candidate of Internet Explorer 8 to the public.