Final Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 public release will wait for quality control
An extra week of quality control testing has been scheduled for the first public beta of Firefox 3.6, which was originally scheduled to have been released today. Wednesday, October 21, at 5:00 pm PDT is the new scheduled release time.
The code freeze for 3.6 Beta 1 took place yesterday. What that means is a bit confusing, but certainly transparent in keeping with open source projects: There is now a Beta 1 release candidate which is undergoing one round of testing in preparation for next Wednesday. Separately, development has begun on 3.6 Beta 2, where testing is ongoing but private. And to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, ther-r-re is a third possibility which no one had counted upon: the beginnings of testing for the 3.6 Release Candidate (not the Beta 1 RC, but the 3.6 final RC).
As the public weighs in, various bugs they find are accumulated alongside those found by Mozilla's crack team of volunteers. For the 3.6 RC, some 118 "blockers" have already been amassed, so there is already a lot of work awaiting Mozilla's developers prior to 3.6's final release, not counting anything else that may turn up.
The two most obvious visual improvements to Firefox 3.6 that testers are looking forward to seeing are the addition of a right-click jump menu for use with the Windows 7 taskbar (GA day for Win7 is next Thursday), and a Ctrl+Tab preview option that scrolls through thumbnails of open tabs in the active window. And Betanews tests of Firefox's cleaned-up version of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that premiered in version 3.5, gives us reason to believe that overall performance may improve by close to one-fourth.
