The Firefox 3/Gecko 1.9 development team has decided there needs to be a Beta 5 release of Firefox 3. …based on the number of blockers remaining. This additional beta will ensure that changes which may affect website compatibility and changes which affect the user experience will get exposure to a wider audience for feedback and regression testing. The string freeze is expect this Friday, March 7th with a code freeze on March 18th. They say Beta 5 will be the last milestone for string changes. No word as of yet on a release date for Beta 5, especially given Beta…

Starting today, there will be a Thunderbird Status Meeting every Tuesday at 9:30 AM Pacific (12:30 PM Eastern). This week’s meeting is going to cover getting ready to go to Alpha 1 on Thunderbird 3 as well as calendar integration and which extensions should be come standard features. The complete (or at this time incomplete) notes of today’s meeting can be found here. Source: David Ascher

Here’s an overview of this week’s Update Meeting: Fx 2.0.0.13 Purposed Release Schedule: Code freeze: March 7 Builds start: March 10 QA starts: March 11 Release to beta channel: March 18 Final Release: March 25 Firefox 3 Beta 4 Awesomebar Real multi-word searching Adaptive learning Download Manager Much improved search, multi-word, match on all data available Visual Refresh New Mac rev Separate Vista and XP themes for Windows users More Linux (as always!) Still coming soon (landed and backed out) Save Link As.. filename fixes JSON backup (Ts hit) 114 hard blockers left, working on load balancing and driving number…

As mentioned in the Weekly Update 2008-02-25, Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 is suppose to be released today. So in theory, when this post goes live Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 should have already been released by Mozilla. Users will be prompted for an automatic update within the next 72 hours.Those wishing to upgrade now can do so via the Help Menu, Check For Updates option or by downloading the latest release at getthunderbird.com. Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 contains many security fixes and the full details can be found in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 Release Notes.

In continuing with the celebration of Ten Years of Mozilla, mozilla.org was launched 10-years ago today. The purpose of mozilla.org was simple, coordinate the open source development of the Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code. The next big date is going to be March 31st, when the Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code was released to developers. On a semi-related note, mozillaZine will be celebrating their 10th anniversary as well on September 1st. Here is brief from their first official article Welcome To MozillaZine: MozillaZine materialized out of a need for a central site for Mozilla advocacy. More and more people want…

Back in September we announced Firefox had passed the 400 Million Downloads mark. CyberNet had estimated (see below) the 500 Million Downloads mark would be around April 15th. Today (February 22nd) Firefox surpassed the 500 Million Downloads mark! So, when should we expect to see 600 Million Downloads? The estimate is July 30th which is about 5 months and 1 week from today. The Firefox Download* Time Line: November 9, 2004 – Fx 1.0 Released February 16, 2005 – 25 Million Downloads April 29, 2005 – 50 Million Downloads November 2, 2005 – 100 Million Downloads November 29, 2005 –…