Article by George Norman

On 17 Jun 2009

The Mozilla Foundation has finally made Firefox 3.5 RC1 (Release Candidate 1) available for download yesterday, the 16th of June. The catch is that this release is meant for Beta testers only; Mozilla has rolled out the “first release candidate for Firefox 3.5, the latest version of the Firefox browser” because it wants its Beta testing community to put the software through its paces before it rolls out Firefox 3.5 RC1 to the general public.

Director of Firefox with the Mozilla Corporation, Mike Beltzner, explains: “We've just released partial updates for Firefox 3.5 beta users which will update them to an early version of the release candidate (the exact version reference is rc1build2: this means it is the first revision of the release candidate for which we'll ship updates, and it required two build attempts). This build is *not* being released on the beta download page; if someone out there wants to get at it, they should first become a beta tester by downloading a beta and then they will receive the updates. As we find issues with the release candidate, we will fix and rebuild. We're already generating a new version (rc2build2) with several small, localized fixes. We can do this because the small-scope nature of the fixes means that we can re-run a segment of the quality assurance tests instead of starting over from scratch.”


Mike Beltzner goes on to say that the goal is to get the most up to date version of Firefox 3.5 RC1 out there for the general public to download by Friday. With more than 800,000 Beta testers looking for bugs and issues, this seems like a reasonable deadline, but the thing to keep in mind is that during these tests something unexpected might come up and throw a wrench in Mozilla’s plans. The other thing to keep in mind, said Beltzner, is the fact that if nothing new and unexpected pops up, then the development team behind Firefox “can be extremely confident of the quality of the release candidate code”.

I think it’s pretty clear now: on the 16th of June Mozilla rolled out an early version of Firefox 3.5 RC1 to Beta testers; on the 19th of June Mozilla will make Firefox 3.5 RC1 available for download to the general public.

While you wait for the release candidate to be rolled out, may I suggest giving Fastest Firefox a glance and help spread the word about how fast Firefox 3.5 is, or alternatively see how you can make the world a better place by participating in Mozilla’s Service Week.

If you want to get the early version of Firefox 3.5 RC1 that Mike Beltzner was talking about, you can do so directly from Mozilla here. Please note that even though the big download tab says Firefox 3.5 RC1, you will actually download Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and update to RC1 afterwards.

Alternatively you might want to check out this other link to get Firefox 3.5 RC1 for Windows, Mac and Linux.



Tags: Mozilla, Firefox 3.5, Release Candidate, RC1

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