Mozilla taking its time with Firefox 3 beta

Mozilla plans on releasing a pre-beta version of Firefox 3 every six weeks or so. Just don't expect a beta to come before Mozilla is happy with the browser.

In a note to the Mozilla development planning group Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering, said:

We are driven by quality, not time.We want to Firefox 3 to be something that we are all proud of.This means features that delight users and the same or higher quality than previous releases."Quality" includes performance (Tp/Ts/TDHTML/etc), footprint, web compatibility, regressions, and general fit and finish.Having said that, we want to move the web forward and are in a competitive market.So we should converge on a release as fast as possible.

In a nutshell, Alpha 7 of Firefox will happen the end of July, but it won't make the cut for beta. That means Firefox 3, which has been chugging through multiple alphas, isn't ready for mass adoption--or even testing--yet. The new roadmap is here.

Other notable comments from Schroepfer:

• "The Firefox front-end has had significantly less development time than the platform and has yet to have the opportunity to innovate on top of infrastructure built for places, password manager, and others.So we'd like to give them until M8 (Sept. 5) to continue to develop user-visible features on top of the core infrastructure."

• "A milestone schedule with a release every 6 weeks (4 weeks till code freeze from last milestone, 2 weeks of stabilization/build work) seems to work the best.Note that actual tree closures will in practice likely be shorter than 2 weeks if there are not multiple re-spins."

• "We'll switch from Alphas to Betas as soon as we believe Firefox is stable and usable enough for daily browsing for a large number of people.Until we hit this criteria we'll continue to release Alphas on the 6 week cadence above.Criteria:

1. Footprint at or below that of 1.8.This is being measured regularly through Talos working set size (http://tinyurl.com/252ka3) and through informal dogfooding.
2. Most sites should display properly and regression free (from previous major release)
3. No known common dataloss bugs
4. No common hangs or crashes
5. No problems with major features in common use cases."