Tuesday, 10 July 2007

Mozilla Delays Firefox 3.0 Beta, To Launch In September

The Mozilla foundation has delayed the beta launch of its much touted Firefox 3.0 by almost six weeks. Reports say that the tentative launch of the browser now is in the middle of September.

Writing in the mozilla.dev.planning group, Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, suggested a revamped milestone schedule for Firefox 3.0, the next major update to the second most popular open-source browser. His suggestions for changes are a postponement of the first beta, slated as recently as last week to debut July 31. It's not expected until Sept. 18 at the earliest.

"Based on this criteria, it does not appear that M7 will be ready to be called a beta," Schroepfer wrote. "Talos is showing a ~18 percent increase in memory footprint and informal dogfooding confirms things are currently worse on the trunk," Schroepfer continued, referring to Mozilla's performance testing project, dubbed Talos. The term "dogfooding" refers to developers using their own under-construction software.