Firefox 3.5 RC to land "first week of June"

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 15 May 2009 at 14:44

Mozilla is planning to push out the Release Candidate of Firefox 3.5 in the first week of June, as the browser's tortured development cycle enters its final leg.

Speaking on the developers' mailing list, the project's director Mike Beltzner claims the company is ready to start setting firm targets for the much delayed browser.

"Based on the great progress we've been making on blockers over the past two weeks, and estimates from the component leads, we're setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, 20 May for Firefox 3.5 RC," he says.

With the code locked down, Beltzner believes the first Release Candidate builds could appear in the final week of May, putting the final RC build "somewhere in the first week of June."

Beltzner's urged developers to put all their efforts into locating blockers, fixing them, and "not bothering people who are working on blockers". There are currently 52 of these show-stopping bugs in the Firefox 3.5 code.

He finishes his post by pointing out that "the finish line is very much in sight", which will strike some as strange given that Firefox 3.1, as it was originally named, was slated for a release in early 2009.

It was initially earmarked as a lightweight update bundling the features that didn't make it into Firefox 3. However, the implementation of a new Javascript rendering engine and private browsing mode have considerably swelled development time.