Firefox 3 almost ready for the general public - But not quite
By Dave Parrack
While Firefox remains in beta testing, it seems the release is now stable enough for more than just tech gurus to consider downloading.
The third incarnation of the increasingly popular Firefox Web browser has been being tested for the last few months by a select bunch of beta testers, whose job it is to report back any flaws or bugs which need fixing prior to the final release for everyone.
Now, according to an article on Reuters, Firefox 3 is now stable and secure enough to be downloaded by everyone. Although they fail to get a direct quote from any company source, they do have Mozilla Corp. Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer claiming that:
“In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there.”
However, the site for budding Firefox testers to download the latest build from still carries the following warning:
“We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download the Firefox 3 beta 4 milestone release. It is intended for testing purposes only.”
So Mozilla aren’t exactly encouraging all and sundry to download, and are merely setting the scene for the final product to be released.
A fifth round of testing and improvements is scheduled to begin in over the next few weeks, said to be mainly fine tuning the look and feel of the program, so a 2nd quarter 2008 release isn’t out of the realms of possibility.
It looks as though Firefox 3 is going to be faster than any of its competitors too, without losing any of the usability and features which make it such a favourite amongst Internet users. Testing recently found beta 4 to be even faster than Apple’s Safari 3.1, which claims to be the speediest browser on the market.
As an avid Firefox user, I can’t wait until the final release gets the go-ahead, but until then, I think I’ll wait until Mozilla actually give it the green light, rather than a Reuters journalist.
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