Mozilla stretches Firefox 3.0 development to fifth beta

Mozilla Corp. this week said it would need to issue a fifth beta of Firefox 3.0 because of the number of unfixed bugs remaining in the browser.

The decision was the second time in the past 30 days that Mozilla added an extra build to the beta process of Firefox 3.0. It wasn't unexpected, however; last week, the head of Mozilla's development said a fifth beta might be necessary, and that a decision would be made by March 3.

"The development team decided that a fifth beta milestone would be required, based on the number of blockers remaining," Mozilla's chief interface designer, Mike Beltzner, said in a message posted Tuesday to the company's site. "Blockers" are Mozilla's term for bugs or changes that are serious enough to stymie the final release.

"This additional beta will ensure that changes which may affect Web site compatibility and changes which affect the user experience will get exposure to a wider audience for feedback and regression testing," Beltzner said.

Beta 5's schedule -- it's slated to enter "code freeze" stage on March 18 -- means that the preview will likely hit Mozilla's download servers sometime between April 1 and April 15 if past previews are any clue.

Meanwhile, the current in-the-works beta, Beta 4, went into code freeze Feb. 26 and may release as early as next week, according to its current status as noted on Mozilla's site. Today, in fact, Mozilla held its usual test day; it has posted a release candidate of Beta 4 and asked users to download and test the beta, then report any bugs they uncover.

But it's possible Mozilla will extend the beta process beyond the fifth build, added Mike Schroepfer, the company's chief engineer. "We'll evaluate whether Beta 5 is the last milestone before [Release Candidate 1] when Beta 5 ships," said Schroepfer in an e-mail Friday.

Beltzner today also clarified comments he made Tuesday that seemed to hint that Beta 5 would be the last in the line. Then, he told developers that Beta 5 would be the "final milestone for string changes." That, however, doesn't mean there might not be more betas. String changes, said Beltzner today in an e-mail, are those to the user interface text, and their earlier deadlines are meant to give programmers time to polish language-specific versions of the browser. "This gives our localizer teams time to do their translation work and allows us to ship betas in more languages than a lot of other products," Beltzner said.

He also said that the time between freezing Beta 5's code and moving to release would be brief. "After code freeze, we expect a shorter baking period before handing off to the build and QA teams for release."

Firefox currently accounts for 17.3% of the browser market, according to Net Applications. The most recent data available pegged Firefox 3.0's part of the browser market at 0.18%, nearly double the 0.1% of the month before. Firefox 2.0, by comparison, has a 16.3% share.

In other browser news this week, rival Microsoft Corp. unveiled the first beta of Internet Explorer 8. Neither Microsoft nor Mozilla, however, have set definitive ship dates for the final versions of their new browsers.