Update, beta will no longer be in July.
Mozilla Delays Firefox 3.0 Beta
The milestone schedule is reset, and the first beta is unlikely
until mid-September.
Firefox 3.0's first beta has been delayed at least six weeks,
Mozilla Corp. engineers said Sunday, and it now won't appear until
the middle of September.
In a posting to the mozilla.dev.planning group Sunday, Mike
Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, suggested a
revamped milestone schedule for Firefox 3.0, the next major update
to the popular open-source browser. Among the changes: a
postponement of the first beta, slated as recently as last week to
debut July 31. It's not expected until Sept. 18 at the
earliest.
"Based on this criteria, it does not appear that M7 will be ready
to be called a beta," Schroepfer wrote. In his post -- which he
described as a written version of verbal discussions held last week
-- Schroepfer used "M" designations to label milestones, which
could be dubbed alphas or betas, depending on their stability. M6,
for example, was the tag placed on Firefox 3.0 Alpha 6, the preview
released July 4; at the time, that version was to be the last alpha
before beta testing began.
"Talos is showing a ~18 percent increase in [memory] footprint and
informal dogfooding confirms things are currently worse on the
trunk," Schroepfer continued, referring to Mozilla's performance
testing project, dubbed Talos. The term "dogfooding" refers to
developers using their own under-construction software.
In addition, several features intended for the Firefox 3.0 final
have yet to make it into the code, including an anti-malware tool and the polished application
programming interfaces needed to support offline Web
software.
The revised schedule published Monday spells out dates
for Alpha 7, as well as M8 and M9. The last two may or may not be
betas. "We'll switch from Alphas to Betas as soon as we believe
Firefox is stable and usable enough for daily browsing for a large
number of people," said Schroepfer.
Dates beyond the Oct. 16 code freeze of M9 are up in the air. "When
will the last Beta ship? As soon as it is ready," Schroepfer
wrote.
Neither Schroepfer's comments nor the revamped calendar mentioned
anything about Firefox 3.0's launch date, which has in the past
been set as sometime this year. Mozilla was not immediately
available for comment on whether the changes will push the final
release into 2008.
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Good planning. I hope this plan will improve Firefox greatly.
