Is there a new Firefox 3 beta available?

Several sites, including BetaNews, has published that you can download Firefox 3 Beta 4. Unfortunately that news is premature, evidenced by the fact that BetaNews had to run a retraction when the devs realized that they missed a key component in the Windows builds that they were getting together. (I also have news on Thunderbird 3 below.)

Beta releases are mainly announced on the Mozilla Developers DevNews blog, with official releases only being available at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html. If a blog tells you you can download a new version of Firefox at any location other than that one, you’re dealing with an unoffical release that Mozilla will in all likelyhood decline to give much support to.

In addition, as BetaNews found out the hard way, just because they’re now working on a later version (such as the nightlies, which currently carry the version 3.0 beta 5pre) doesn’t mean that they can call  the nightly builds just before the bump in version number what’s going to be released. Someone currently has an Ubuntu package labeled Firefox 3 Beta 4 RC1. They may have gotten that from the testing cycle for the release, but the only place where I see a beta RC being talked about is in preparation for a test day. So while it may be a pretty damned stable version, Mozilla is not rolling it out for most testers to use.

When Mozilla officially announces Firefox 3 Beta 4 I’ll post a notice with a link to an announcement on the Mozilla DevNews site (that’s here they ask that we send people wanting to download it anyway). It may take me a day or two to get it posted, but Dev News is the official mouthpiece for news of test release. If anyone says something’s available without linking to DevNews, preferably to release notes as well, chances are high that they’re full of crap.

What about Thunderbird 3?

People testing nightly builds of what will become Thunderbird 3 are sayting that it’s even better than the latest official release of Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 (or .13pre). The Thundrbird developpers group is reporting that there will be a “tentative code-freeze date for Thunderbird 3.0a1 of Tuesday, April 8, 23:59 Pacific Time” so we can expect the first alpha builds to roll out by the end of April.