Is Firefox 3 Beta 5 out yet?
Posted by Peng on 27 March 2008
If anyone says they have Firefox 3 Beta 5, they’re lying through their teeth.
That image, by the way, is from the page that shows up when you first launch Firefox 3 Beta 5’s Release Candidate (click on the picture to see what the whole page shows you). As the full image shows you there’s a test day tomorrow (Friday), and from the Mozilla wiki I see that as I write this the Release Candidates for Beta 5 are still being built so you can definitely look for the new beta to get released next week. Once it does, that FirstRun page will probably continue with the robot-themed pages used for the last few betas.
From what I’m seeing in the nightly builds this will probably be the last beta for Firefox 3, but that doesn’t mean next comes the release of Firefox 3. No, before that we’ll get a Release Candidate or two (at least), and Wired Magazine is reporting that we should see a final release in June. But please keep in mind that several things have broken in the last few weeks and we’re not certain all of them will be fixed by the time the last Release Candidate comes out. This is especially onerous for theme designers who now find it even harder to make one theme that will not only work in Firefox 3 with all of it’s UI changes but also on all platforms (Linux, OSX and two flavors of Windows). Many extension developers haven’t updated their extensions to properly work with Firefox 3 yet either, so I’d assume the next couple of months will find add-on developers quite busy.
Also, I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Firefox 3 will run on your FIrefox 2 profile so updating won’t be so hard once Firefox 3 comes out, but once Firefox 3 gets a hold of your profile it will never work again in Firefox 2. You may want to get ready now to make a new profile for Firefox 3, just so that FIrefox 2 will be able to continue to use it’s profile in case you decide the devs have changed too much in Fx3. It’s unlikely seeing how much faster Firefox 3 is, but there is a lot changed and you may decide you don’t like it.
