"We're going to wrap up Beta 3 in the next week regardless of 'upvar' status," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, referring to a particularly troublesome bug in Firefox 3.1's new JavaScript engine that has held up releasing that preview.
"A fourth beta will follow approximately six weeks after, as a vehicle for more testing of [the] TraceMonkey [JavaScript engine], video, Places and other eagerly-awaited improvements, as well as feedback from Beta 3," Shaver said in a message on a company forum .
Although Mozilla originally conceived Firefox 3.1 as a "fast-track" upgrade slated to launch in late 2008 , the new browser's progress has been much slower than planned. In fact, Mozilla has reworked Firefox 3.1's schedule several times. Last November, for example, it slipped a third beta into the timetable, in part to fix more bugs, but also to give features such as TraceMonkey, additional testing time .
Mozilla has not published a revised release schedule for Firefox 3.1 -- Beltzner said he's working on one -- but the addition of Beta 4 will clearly push the release into next quarter. Until now, Mozilla had regularly cited the first quarter of 2009 as the delivery date.
The delay prompted one developer to suggest that Mozilla rename Firefox 3.1. "Given all the efforts that went into Firefox 3.1 and given its prolonged schedule and expanded scope, I was wondering whether it might make more sense to name it Firefox 3.5 just as Firefox 1.1 was renamed Firefox 1.5?" asked Simon Paquet, who works on localizing Thunderbird , Mozilla Messaging Inc.'s e-mail client. "That way we would more clearly communicate to users that this isn't just a minor update but a major step forward."
Mozilla faces increased pressure from rival browser makers, who have recently made moves of their own. Microsoft Corp., which may wrap up Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) as early as next month, debuted the new browser's release candidate in late January. Just two days ago, Apple Inc. launched a public beta of Safari 4, which is nearly 40% faster than the newest Firefox 3.1 build in rendering JavaScript, according to benchmark tests Computerworld has run.
[from: http://www.pcworld.com]
