As of late last night, the Mozilla Developers Calendar for Firefox 2.0, still shows RC1 to be shipped/released tomorrow (Sept 26th). No other dates have been added for future release candidates or the final build. But, the last ‘Bon Echo Status Meeting’ is still scheduled for October 24th, which is still the tentative final release date of Firefox 2.0.
However at this point in Firefox 2.0’s development, everything now hangs on what happens once RC1 comes out. Remember, Release Candidates (RC) are essentially the finished product feature wise, but may still have some minor bugs that need to be fixed. RC’s typically have more folks testing as they are much stabler/safer builds then say Alpha or Beta builds. Typically I have seen around 2 to 3 RC’s before the final build is released.
With a little under a month left for the current estimated final release date, there should be more than enough time to work out any minor bugs. Nonetheless, given the number of delays just getting beta 2 out and the fact the project is now about a month behind the original schedule, I am not making any bets for an October 24th release date. I will say this though, at least Firefox 2.0’s release schedule hasn’t deviated as badly as that of Windows Vista!
Bon Echo RC1 is mixed bag for me – in one hand it’s better than previous releases of Firefox (much new features, faster, etc), but in other it’s much worse (UI). For example, Options menu is again totally redesigned which is bad. What is important it’s now missing some advanced options (like turn of image autoresizing) which you have to control with about:config etc. I have feeling that some advanced features (like really usable download manager) will never be finished.
Extensions web page is totally unfriendly. Advanced categorization is desperatly missing (like “show extensions for version …”, “show only firefox extensions”, etc).
The last redesign on the extensions page on Firefox Add-Ons was bad enough when they made the default sort as date updated instead of name.
Could be they are trying to make Firefox more ‘dummy proof’ now by moving more of the options into about:config. The new UI is taking a little getting use to but I do like having the themes and extensions combined into on manager now.