Firefox 3.1 beta 2 delayed, beta 3 now scheduled*

The Mozilla team had decided to delay beta 2 and release a beta 3 in order to resolve bugs and garner more feedback before the early 2009 ship.

An "uncooperative tree" and 15 remaining bugs has delayed the release of beta 2, though developers are confident that number will be pared down to zero by the end of the day. Mozilla expected the code would freeze on November 4 and release shortly thereafter.

After beta 2 is released later this month, the team will focus on getting another beta out by the end of the December rather than issue a release candidate.

[Update: A spokeswoman for Mozilla acknowledged there is discussion about a third beta but claimed on Wednesday that a final decision on whether to release a Beta 3 -- or move to release candidate -- has not been made.]

What's slowing down the process is the addition of several new features to Beta 2 such as private browsing as well as several new features introduced over the weekend, namely new Clear Recent History function, which allows a more fine grained history removal, a new "Forget About this Site" function, which removes records of a site, and a separate UI for clearing private data.

On the team's weekly call today, Damon Sicore, Senior Director of Platform Engineering, noted that the number of bugs is increasing rather than decreasing as beta 2 development continues and suggested the code requires another beta cycle to ensure it is rock solid before a release candidate is issued. He said there were 78 blockers five weeks ago and now the number of blockers  is up to 103.

The release of another beta also gives extensions developers more time to enable compatibility with the forthcoming browser update; to date, only about 25 percent of extensions have been determined to be compatible with FF 3.1.

About 150,000 people are testing beta 1 and that number is expected to double with the release of Beta 2 this month.

He said a third beta cycle will impact the release timeframe but not by much because of the holiday break late next month. "The impact on [the] shipping schedule won't be as huge as some might think because we're looking at dead time between December and January and so that time can be used to collect data before the milestone, RC1 or beta 3," said Mike Beltzner, lead Firefox developer,  before the team decided to go for a beta 3.

Update: A spokeswoman for Mozilla claimed on Wednesday that a final decision on whether to release Beta 3 -- or move to a release candidate -- has not been made.

Firefox is an open source browser and the No 2 browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox controls roughly 20 percent of market share, researchers indicated earlier this month.