The release candidate 1 version of the Firefox browser version 1.5 is almost but not entirely unlike a released product, except it hasn’t been released yet, and may miss its originally planned date.
Quality control over at the Mozilla Foundation has had to break out the insect spray and fly swatters, in order to snuff a few late-breaking bugs in the Firefox 1.5 code.
For the daring, Firefox 1.5 beta 2 is still available for download. Those who need stability in their online browsing lives can grab the stable 1.0.7 release instead.
Why the delay? MozillaZine posted a note from the QA team about it:
Asa Dotzler informs us that a few issues (mostly relating to security and the software update system) have been discovered and will have to be fixed before Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1 ships. Fixes for major bugs such as these are the only ones that are allowed to be checked in during a lockdown.
Dotzler provided some specifics on his blog on Monday; right now, it looks like RC1 won’t make the Friday ship date as previously announced:
We’re in the final stages of the Firefox release cycle. Last night at midnight we were scheduled to lock down the tree and take no further code changes before shipping the first Firefox release candidate. We didn’t quite make it and this morning there were a couple of regressions, a couple of newly discovered security issues, and a couple of unfixed Update bugs.
As of this evening, we’ve taken care of the regressions, one of the security issues, and all of the unfixed Update bugs. We’ve still got one or two security issues to wrap up before we’re code complete.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
