Reuters quotes Mozilla as saying Firefox 3 is “ready for prime-time”

Reuters published a story on Thursday reporting that one of Firefox’s “creators” told them Firefox 3 is “ready for download.” They may have gotten that quote from Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla Corp. (MoCo) Vice President of Engineering, but I think someone spiked his Red Bull because every tester knows that comment is bull for a number of reasons.

While Firefox 3 may have a ton of bugs in FIrefox 3 Beta 4, the current published milestone, it is definitely not “ready to download” by the general public. There are still some themeing issues to be resolved in Firefox 3 beta 5pre as of yesterday’s nighly build. (Yes, Virginia, there will definitely be at least a fifth beta, and then maybe Release Candidates.) There are also several major bugs that didn’t get fixed until the beta 5pre builds, so until beta 5 is released for testing I’m not sure where anyone, let alone the VP of Engineering at Mozilla Corp., says Firefox 3 is ready to be downloaded.

To add insult to injury, we got some new bugs in the nightly builds  over the last few days that certainly have to get squashed before Firefox 3 can hit Release Candidate stage. There’s an excellent list that I’ve seen posted a few times over the last week or so that I want to share to clarify exactly what all these stages a program goes through before it can be released. This is taken by a posting by Bluefang in one of the several threads in Mozillazine’s Firefox Builds section pointing out issues in Firefox 3 Beta 4. I’ve also seen it in other threads, but this is teh first one I could find today.

ALPHA - an internal testing version for use by the developers. This is usually not feature complete and us usually very unstable from all of the changes/additions.
BETA - this is a public testing version. This is to help the developers find and fix bugs. Usually these are feature complete and are somewhat stable, however they are not finished products.
RELEASE CANDIDATE - this is a version that could possibly be a final release. These are used to make sure there aren’t any show stopping bugs.
FINAL RELEASE - This is a release that is considered stable and bug-free enough to be useable for day-to-day use by the common user.

If you want to know how close Firefox 3 is to being ready to shipping a final (what I call a “gold”) release, look at the version currently available for download. If it doesn’t say “Release Candidate” then you cam know it’s still got a bit of work to go. If it does say “Release Candidate” or “RC” in the download link from Mozilla (if it’s not coming from Mozilla’s servers I wouldn’t even touch it with a 50-foot pole because you don’t know what has been changed from Mozilla’s release) then go to the Firefox Builds section of Mozillazine and check out the Daily Build threads. These topics are always titled something like “The Official Win32 20080323 [Trunk] build is not yet out.” That thread will be about the absolute latest nightly build of Firefox 3 and is so new people aren’t even using it unless they use hourly builds. (If the topic title says the build is out then people can download and use that nightly build.) Look at the comments being posted there. If it looks like things are still broken from the posts and responses aren’t saying it’s getting fixed after Firefox 3 comes out then you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that Firefox 3 isn’t ready for prime time yet no matter what a MoCo executive says.

I won’t link to the Reuters story because I think it’s that inaccurate. People have been asking for months when Firefox 3 is coming out and the official answer  has always been the same: “When it’s ready.” That’s now looking less like late May and more like at least June, so I can see Reuters bugging MoCo so much about an article that someone finally gave in, but I bet Mike Schroepfer got an earful from his boss once the article hit the Wide Wide World of Web. He lost some believeability from me, too, because too many of his comments sounded like something the guys in Redmond would do to try to build a buzz for a product that’s still a few months from release.