Mozilla makes Firefox 3.0 bug-fix decision

Mozilla decided Tuesday to roll out a second release candidate for Firefox
3.0 that will include fixes for about 40 bugs. The alternative was to declare
the open-source browser good "as is," then patch the problems with
a later update.

Firefox 3.0's final release will be delayed about five days, according to notes
from a Tuesday meeting that Mozilla posted to its site.

"As discussed at today's Firefox 3.0 meeting, we've decided that there
is sufficient need to produce a new Release Candidate before shipping,"
said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's lead developer, in an e-mail. "Due to the
time required to complete some other external dependencies, we don't expect
that this will significantly impact our shipping date, and still estimate a
mid-June release date."

Release Candidate 2 (RC2) will be closed as "code complete" Wednesday,
a tight timetable possible only because most of the issues uncovered by testers
in the first release candidate have already been patched, reviewed and approved.
"Because of the early start we got last week identifying the bugs that
would be part of an RC2, which, at that time, was speculative, we're in really
good shape," added Beltzner.

Only three of approximately 40 identified bugs have not yet "landed,"
or completed Mozilla's review and approval process. About a fourth of the bugs
Mozilla's planning to patch in RC2 are changes in localized versions of the
browser.

Last week, Mozilla highlighted
10 notable bugs that it said it would consider as it made a choice between RC2
and a later update, dubbed "3.0.1", that would be released several
weeks after Firefox 3.0 shipped.

One of those bugs, a performance issue limited to Linux, got attention this
morning before the RC2 go/no go meeting. "This was discussed at the [last]
Tuesday meeting and is a decent perf[ormance] win if we can get this in,"
read the early notes. "It tends to make the UI unusable when the user hits
this state, so it should be considered for an RC2."

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