I had kind of thought Mozilla was being overly optimistic with their targeted Match 27th release date for Firefox 3 Beta 5. I realize the Beta 5 release was suppose to fix a few remaining blockers that couldn’t be fixed in time for the Beta 4 release. However, the aggressive Beta 5 schedule would have had the release a little over two weeks after the Beta 4 release. That just seemed too soon and uncharacteristic of typical Firefox release pattern (with the exception of the Firefox 2.0.0.11 release at the end of November 2007). I suspected Mozilla was not going to hit the March 27th release date when there was no mention of a ‘release’ in this week’s Weekly Update meeting.

Instead of being released today, Beta 5 has just been declared code complete. The Build Team has started generating the Firefox 3 Beta 5 Release Candidate builds. The next phase is for the Quality Assurance Team to start testing. This Friday, March 28th will allow users to test the Release Candidate builds, not the final build of Firefox 3 Beta 5. For those of you interested in participating you can get information and sign up at Quality.Mozilla.Org (QMO). Depending on how the test day goes, Beta 5 could be released as early as next week.

Firefox 3 Beta 5

• Code freeze: March 18
• Builds start: March 27
• QA starts: March 28
• Release to beta channel: ?
• Final Release: Week of March 31st?

News Source: Mozilla Developers News