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Firefox 3.6 final release delayed into 2010.

December 21st, 2009 oDx Leave a comment Go to comments

Mozilla on Thursday issued a fifth beta of Firefox 3.6 rather than move on to a release candidate, a decision that will push the final code ship date into early 2010. Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 was released as an update to current testers early Thursday, and can also be installed by others who download it from Mozilla’s site.

Beta 5 has 130 new bug fixes, including a major TraceMonkey JavaScript rendering engine bug that was causing crashes. Additionally, the private browsing mode, password retrieval and fast startup mode were updated.

“Beta 5 builds are being tested by QA now, targeting a Thursday release unless we get to RC [Release Candidate] first,” Mozilla had said earlier in the week. “We are really, really close to being code-complete & only need 8 more patches and a TraceMonkey merge. If we can go to build today or tomorrow, QA will scrap Beta 5 and we’ll release RC to the beta audience ASAP.”

“Mozilla released a fifth version of Firefox 3.6 to its more than 600,000 beta users as part of its continuing program to gather feedback and get fixes into the hands of the people evaluating the preview,” added Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, via CW. “We expect to be able to issue a release candidate before the end of this year, but we’ll likely hold off on the official release until early in the new year.”