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An item on MozillaNews suggests that there may never be a final release of 1.8, despite a beta version being available.

At a Mozilla staff meeting last month the issue was raised and subsequent discussion 'seems to indicate that with Firefox and Thunderbird development, along with other Mozilla Foundation activities, and the lack of developers, reviewers, and sufficient users of the Suite, there very well may not be a final release of the 1.8 version'.

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1.8 had been scheduled to begin this month, with the results carried forward into the 1.1 upgrades to Firefox and Thunderbird. However the updated roadmap talks only of sustaining maintenance and security update for the stable releases, 1.7.x.

The Mozilla Organization plans to focus development efforts on the new standalone applications, Firefox and Thunderbird, as well as other applications based on the development toolkit they use.

'We aim to make Firefox and Thunderbird our premier products, and encourage extension authors and other ISVs [independent software vendors] to target these applications for their work as well,' the roadmap states.

Quite what effect this will have on AOL's Netscape is unknown. Netscape 8 is currently in beta, and although the browser component is Firefox-based, it still retains the email composer and client derived from Mozilla.

Mozilla users have complained that Firefox lacks a number of the advanced preferences of the suite and argue that the user base is much larger than the Mozilla developers estimate.