Mozilla said they’ll release another beta of Firefox 3.1 before they’ll launch the official 3.1 final version. Because they develop this beta, the launch of 3.1 final gets slowed down. Mozilla expects to release the 3.1 final version around the second quarter of 2009 or later.
The third beta release has been slowed down for quite some time now, because of a tough bug in the new JavaScript-engine included in version 3.1. The developers of Mozilla said they’ll release the third bèta version next week, even if they could not fix the bug called the “upvar-bug”.
“A fourth bèta will follow approximately six weeks after the launch of the third one, and in that version we’ll test the new TraceMonkey JavaScript-engine some more.” Mike Shaver from Mozilla says. We could already expect this news, cause Shaver said last week-end that the bugs in the JavaScript-engine would slow the release of 3.1 final down. That’s why they’re releasing up to four bèta versions of 3.1, to make sure all bugs will be cleared out by the time they release 3.1 final.
These decisions started a discussion whether or not it’s good to slow down the final release of 3.1 final. “Without TraceMonkey we could have released 3.1 final long time ago.” Firefox-developer David Baron said last week.
Firefox 3.1 was supposed to be a quick update that Mozilla would release by the end of 2008. But actually, the development is going alot slower than they expected. The slowing down of 3.1 final, and the extra functions that will be included in 3.1 final, also started a discussion about the version number of Firefox.
Some people think it’s better to name this release 3.5 instead of 3.1, cause that would indicate the huge changes made in this release. 3.1 would make it look like a small update, they think. Mozilla already skipped a version number earlier. They changed version 1.1 to version 1.5.
April 5th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I liked it.