Newest Firefox Beta has Critical Flaws, Mozilla Admits

May 24, 2008 – 10:32 AM

Mozilla has identified 10 high-priority bugs in Firefox 3.0, three of them pegged “critical,” but won’t decide until next week whether to release the browser anyway or restart the final stretch by issuing a second release candidate (RC2).

“We are making a go/no go decision early next week, as we are still collecting feedback [on Release Candidate 1],” Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, said in an e-mail Thursday.

Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) launched a week ago, but Mozilla has not yet committed to RC2. Previously, the company has only said it is targeting June as the release window for the final code.

On the “mozilla.dev.planning” newsgroup, Schroepfer also said that on May 27 Mozilla will either call Firefox 3.0 finished with RC1, or build RC2 with fixes for the 10 bugs that have been collected.

In the meantime, testing will begin on the 10 bugs. “If we need to do an RC2, they’ll be ready to go,” he said. “If we ship RC1, we can get them in the 3.0.1.”

The bug list includes three marked “critical” on Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug-tracking database and management system. Eight of the bugs affect Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, while two afflict only Linux.

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