Mozilla slates Firefox 3.0 RC1 for late May
Mozilla Corp. announced that it has stopped making changes to the first release
candidate of Firefox
3.0 and is working to get that build to users by the end of the month.
"We are code complete for Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 (RC1)," said
Mike
Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, in a post to the company's
development blog on Saturday. "If all goes well we should have the
Release Candidate publicly available in late May."
The release candidate -- typically the final stage before software goes final
-- will be pushed to more than 1.2 million users when it launches, Schroepfer
said.
It's possible that RC1 will be the one and only release candidate. "The
QA cycle for RC1 is more extensive than the betas since this may be our last
milestone," Schroepfer said in a message posted to the "mozilla.dev.planning"
message forum. However, if serious bugs are uncovered, "we will continue
to release new Release Candidates until we are ready for final ship," he
said.
Mozilla developers quashed several bugs starting Friday morning to make the
Saturday "code freeze" deadline, according to the mozilla.dev.planning
forum. Among the fixed flaws was a regression bug that made Firefox 3.0 incorrectly
convert characters when loading URLs.
Mozilla issued three release candidates in the run-up to the final code of
Firefox 2.0 in 2006; as recently as late March Schroepfer
said that he expected Firefox 3.0 to follow that same pattern.
The open-source developer last updated its under-construction Firefox 3.0 nearly
six weeks ago when it released
Beta 5 to testers. Days before that, Schroepfer said Mozilla was shooting
for an early-May RC1, but warned that that target might slip. "The release
candidates will move a little slower than beta," he said in late March,
because of the need to account for more public feedback than with earlier builds.
Also in late March, Schroepfer said that the final version of Firefox would
likely ship in June. Monday, he said that Mozilla is still on track for a final
release by the end of next month.
Firefox
currently accounts for about 17.7% of the browser market, according to Net
Applications Inc.'s most recent data. Microsoft
Corp.'s Internet
Explorer retains the browser lead with 74.8%, while Apple
Inc.'s Safari holds down third place with 5.8%.
» posted by abennett
Computerworld
Symantec Backup Exec 12 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8 deliver industry leading Windows data protection and system recovery. Download this whitepaper to find out the top reasons to upgrade and how to get continuous data protection and complete system recovery.
Data and system loss — from a hard drive failure, malicious attack, natural disaster, or simple human error — can happen anytime. Don’t leave your business vulnerable. Make sure you have a secure recovery strategy in place. Symantec's latest backup and system recovery technology can efficiently restore critical applications, individual emails and documents and even restore your entire system in minutes in the event of a loss.
Businesses face a growing challenge to ensure that the IT environment is properly protected. Backup Exec 12 integrates with other applications in the Symantec family of products, to complement your current data protection strategy, keep your data securely backed up and make it recoverable when you need it most.
VMware ESX Server in the Enterprise
By Edward L. Haletky
Published Dec 29, 2007 by Prentice Hall.
Enter now! | Official rules | Sample chapter
Green IT
By Toby Velte, Anthony Velte, Robert C. Elsenpeter
To be published Oct. 10, 2008 by McGraw Hill Professional
Enter now! | Official rules | About the book
