I found this great update on the Firefox 3 release schedule straight from Mozilla. It looks like when they release beta 5, they’ll work hard to stabilize that and then start work on finishing Firefox with the release candidates.
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“The final release of Firefox 3 is due in June, the company said Wednesday during a roundtable discussion with a small group of tech bloggers.
During the event, the key members of the Mozilla team, including CEO John Lilly, gave a quick overview of the product release schedule for the next version of the open source web browser.
According to VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer, the first Release Candidate will ship in early May. The RC1 stage is the point at which most of the larger extension developers re-work their code to be fully compatible with Firefox 3. So if your favorite extension isn’t yet working, you’ll only have to wait another month or so.
Right now, the latest Firefox 3 release is beta version 4. The Firefox 3 betas have about 700,000 users right now — a small but dedicated chunk of Firefox’s entire user base of 160 million people. The public release of Beta 5 will be out the first week of April (the nightly builds are available for testing now), and that will be the last beta release before Firefox enters the release candidate stage.”
