Mozilla launches final Firefox 3.0 beta

by Gregg Keizer

April 2, 2008 —

Mozilla unveiled the final beta of Firefox 3.0 Wednesday and will move on to
the release candidate stage by freezing changes as early as next week.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 landed on Mozilla's download servers on Wednesday.

Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's interface designer, highlighted
several changes to the open-source browser, including improved UI integration
with the underlying operating system, performance gains from additional changes
to the JavaScript engine, and an unspecified number of bug fixes and modifications
for features new in Firefox 3.0, such as the full-page zoom and bookmark backup
and restore.

Beltzner also called out other speed optimizing changes "to improve performance
over previous releases as measured by the popular SunSpider
[JavaScript] test from Apple, and in the speed of Web applications like Google
[ Gmail ] and Zoho Office."

Beta 5's release was delayed somewhat by the discovery last week of a serious
bug in the Mac version of the browser, which required fixing before Mozilla
would sign off on the preview.

Updated
release notes also published today noted that Beta 5 includes more than
750 changes since the rollout
of Beta 4 about three weeks ago.

Today's beta will be the last for Firefox 3.0, Mozilla's chief engineer has
said, and developers will be moving on to Release Candidate 1 (RC1). In notes
from a Monday meeting that have been posted to the Mozilla Web site, the code-freeze
date for the release candidate has been set as next Tuesday.

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, said last week that
he expects Firefox 3.0 to run through three release candidates before the final
version. Mozilla has targeted June for delivering the browser.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 40 languages
from Mozilla's
site.

However, as has been its practice with every beta, Mozilla again warned casual
users against using the preview. "Firefox 3 Beta 5 is a developer preview
release of Mozilla's next generation Firefox browser and is being made available
for testing purposes only," the release notes read.

Computerworld