From the Mozilla Developer Centre:

Whenever we’re asked “when is Firefox going to be released” we endeavour to answer to the best of our abilities, but the truth of the matter is that we’ll only ever ship “when it’s ready”. We have a lot of indicators that help us understand when the product is ready for release: feedback from our pre-release milestones, excitement in the community and the press, availability of compatible Add-Ons, and a large active beta community helping us ensure that the release is compatible with all the various sites on the Internet.

After more than 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, we’re proud to announce that we’re ready. It is our expectation to ship Firefox 3 this upcoming Tuesday, June 17th. Put on your party hats and get ready to download Firefox 3 - the best web browser, period.

Plus the 3rd Release Candidate is out today.  Unless you’re on a Mac you don’t need it though, as it contains only a single change to fix a Mac-only bug that was causing the system to hang or crash at startup or shutdown.

Mozilla has released the second Release Candidate for Firefox 3, if you had RC1 installed it would have come as an automatic update, otherwise you can get it from the download page.  The release notes for RC2 are here. 

There aren’t any new features, this is a pure bugfix release. Ironically though, there are more ‘known issues’ in RC2 than there were in RC1 (21 vs 17). 

The final for Firefox 3 is due later this month I believe.

Sweet.  I didn’t see this before, but Firebug has a new beta version too, which means that it works in Firefox 3 beta 4.  Grab it from the releases page under the Firebug 1.1 Betas heading.  Possibly the single most useful Firefox plugin for me, the fact that it wasn’t working in the beta releases of FF3 was what was stopping me from switching to the beta. No more excuses now, the Adblock Plus plugin even works.

Mozilla has released the 4th beta of the upcoming Firefox 3 browser.  Check out the review of the new beta by Mozilla Links.  Updates in this release:

• Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
• Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
• Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

There’s a link to the download site at the bottom of this page.

It has also been announced that there will be a 5th beta release, with the code freeze on the 18th of March, which means the beta should be available around March 31st. Or they may release it on 1st April just to screw with everyone

Percy Cabello on Mozilla Links has posted about the recent Gran Paradiso developers meeting where they discussed the new features in Firefox 3.  They came up with a list of features, separated into mandatory, highly desirable & ‘nice to have’. 

The mandatory features were:

• Improved interaction with Add-ons: clearer, more coherent language; less steps to install; more visible way to configure add-ons, probably to be moved back to the general Options window, which I hope deeply; more noticeable alerts when updates are available; a permanent restart Firefox button.
• Support for remote bookmarks, bookmarks and history annotation.
• Files could be handled by web services. If I am reading this correctly, this could mean you would be able to click on an attached document and open it with something like Writely or Google Documents. Or perhaps, as I asked Santa, the ability to redirect mailto: links to web email services.
• A much needed print support to prevent cut paragraphs and true WYSIWYG.
• The much requested MSI installer which will be a much welcomed improvement for IT administrators as it will ease deployment and updating of Firefox across a company.
• In the security front: support for Microsoft CardSpace and OpenID (check tomorrow’s article for more coverage on this). Smarter credentials handling.
• Airbag, the Google backed open source crash reporting tool will replace currently licensed TalkBack.

These would all be cool, but the two best features I saw were on the ‘highly desirable’ list:

• Save web pages as PDF files, plus integrated with history. That would be just awesome.
• Support pause/resume downloads across sessions.

Both of those would indeed be just awsome.  You can see the full list with details plus other info on the Firefox 3 requirements doc.

Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 was released in December and according to the Mozilla Release Roadmap, final release is due November 2007 (est.). Another alpha is due in the next couple of months.

Mozilla has released the third Release Candidate for Firefox 2 for Windows & Mac, following on from the Linux release a few days ago.  There’s a good chance that this will be the last release candidate before the final production release.  People who had RC2 installed would have received RC3 already as an automatic update. For everyone else, you can download it here.

As of this release, the only plugins I have installed that still don’t work are:

• Menu Editor
• Copy Plain Text

Firebug, the Web Developer Tool Bar, Adblock and the rest I have installed all work fine though, so for my 2 cents it’s now safe to update to the new version.