Newest Firefox Beta has Critical Flaws

Mozilla has identified 10 high-priority bugs in Firefox 3.0 but won't decide until next week whether to release the browser or issuing a second release candidate (RC2).


Newest Firefox Beta has Critical Flaws, Mozilla Admits

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.

One of Linux bugs has caught the eye of some Firefox users, in part, because of a short blog post that garnered attention on Digg.com . The blogger, Jason Clinton, who works for Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc., a Kansas City company that specializes in cluster-based systems and Linux servers, took Mozilla to task.

On Tuesday, Clinton called Mozilla's support for Linux "second-class" and blasted the open-source developer over a bug. "Release managers just made the call that Firefox 3.0 will release with a known bug which brings Linux systems to their knees."

The bug Clinton referenced, tagged as "421482" in Bugzilla, is one of the 10 on the list that Mozilla's using to decide whether to release Firefox 3.0 as is or craft RC2 for another go towards final code.

In Bugzilla, developers argued over the extent of the problem -- which some Linux users said seriously affected Firefox's performance, as well as their systems overall -- and where the fault lay -- in the browser or in SQLite, the database Firefox uses for its revamped bookmark and history feature, dubbed "Places."

On Wednesday, in a separate e-mail, Schroepfer said that Mozilla developers were looking into the bug and were confident a solution had been found. "You can see that a couple different issues have been accidently confused," he said. "Overall, I think we have some good options to make this work well."

Firefox 3.0 will be the first major upgrade to the browser since October 2006. But Mozilla may ship another version before the end of the year, Schroepfer has said, in order to add features that weren't ready in time for Firefox 3.0.

Firefox 3 RC1 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 41 languages from Mozilla's site.

The Modern Browser Wars

Apple's Safari, Mozilla's Firefox 3, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 duke it out to be the program you use most on your PC.


Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best?

Back when the earliest programs for viewing Web content simply browsed flat pages of images and text, the name browser truly fit the software.

But yesterday's amateur pages have evolved into dynamic, content-rich portals and powerful online programs. For many online habitués, the do-it-all browser has become a PC's single most important program.

Recognizing that fact, Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and Mozilla's Firefox are battling to win the nod as your browser of choice. So which one should you use--Safari 3.1, Firefox 3, or Internet Explorer 8?

Apple's latest offering, Safari 3.1, preserves the company's signature focus on clean design and smooth usability, but it lacks any phishing or malware filters.

For its part, Mozilla should have applied the finishing touches to Firefox 3 by the time you read this. From under-the-hood memory improvements to a major reworking for bookmarks, version 3 represents a big step forward.

Whereas the new Firefox and Safari browsers are ready to roll, Microsoft's early beta of Internet Explorer 8 remains a work in progress. Bugs and rough edges are to be expected in a first beta intended for developers and testers. But IE 8 beta 1 provides a glimpse of new features such as WebSlices (which let sites create widgety snippets of information that you can view by clicking a bookmark button) and Activities (which add right-click menu options for looking up selected text and pages on map, translation and other sites) that will distinguish the browser Microsoft eventually releases.

Firefox, IE, and Safari are the three most popular browsers, according to Internet usage statistics, but they aren't the only ones available.

(SIDEBAR: This is my 100th post in this blog! Kudos to me :))

Firefox Should Ship in June

Also confirms that it will release the final beta of Firefox 3.0 shortly.

Mozilla Expects to Release Firefox 3.0 Final in June

Mozilla Corp. Thursday confirmed that it will release the final beta of Firefox 3.0 shortly, and that it expects to deliver the finished browser to users in June.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 has been code-frozen, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of engineering, and is working its way toward release. "That will be the last beta for Firefox 3.0," he said. Once Beta 5 is out of the way, developers will move to the Release Candidate (RC) stage.
Release Candidate 1 (RC1) should be ready sometime in early May, said Schroepfer, assuming Mozilla meets its current schedule. "The release candidates will move a little slower than beta," he continued, noting that the company must make allowances for public feedback.

Mozilla typically tries to dissuade most users from trying betas, calling them fit only for developers and testing, but in the past has encouraged the public to try out its RC builds.

Although plans are flexible, Schroepfer said he expects version 3.0 to hold true to past Firefox form and cycle through three release candidates before Mozilla signs off on the code. The RC period is also useful to extension developers, he said, many of whom wait until the code is at that stage before tweaking their add-ons.

If all goes according to plan, Firefox 3.0 will wrap up and ship in June.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 about two and a half weeks ago. According to its online schedule, Beta 5 will probably hit the company's download servers sometime early next week.

The open-source Firefox currently accounts for about 17.3% of the browser market, according to Net Applications Inc.'s most recent data. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer rules the roost with 74.9%, while Apple Inc.'s Safari holds down third place with 5.7%.

Firefox Increasingly Popular

The 500 millionth download of the Firefox browser happened last night, evidence of the immense popularity of the little browser that could.

Firefox: On Its Way to Web Domination?

According to the folks at Mozilla, the 500 millionth download of the Firefox browser happened last night. That doesn't, of course, represent a half billion people--I've probably downloaded various versions of the browser thirty times myself, for one computer or another--but it's still a whole lotta downloads, and evidence of the immense popularity of the little browser that could.

I like to do periodic reports of usage of Firefox on PCWorld.com, and these numbers too show Firefox getting more and more popular. The trend for Firefox usage is still trending upwards over time. In fact, January 2008 was the first month during which a third of site visitors--34.36 percent, to be overly exact--used Firefox.

Internet Explorer remains the most-used broser at PCWorld.com, but total usage for IE 7, IE 6, and the dregs of previous versions has fallen below sixty percent. (Back in September 2004, when Firefox was still an obscure beta, just one percent of visitors used it--and around 90 percent of visitors used IE.)

PCWorld.com users are a lot more likely than garden-variety Internet types to use Firefox--here's a report that has overall usage at around 17 percent. (Such data tends to vary a lot from source to source, though--here's another site saying that Firefox usage is around 25 percent.)

I hesitate to make any predictions here, but given that Firefox is no longer an unknown newcomer and its share is still creeping upward, and Microsoft seems to have lost the will to radically upgrade IE, here's a scenario that no longer seems wholly implausible: Firefox may eventually hit 51 percent usage, making it the Web's dominant browser by any definition.
If it happens...well, in that case I'll just pretend I predicted it rather than saying it could happen.