Firefox 5 due for June ’11 release

Mozilla are pushing out software faster than people can download it. Latest information released indicates that Mozilla have set a more aggressive timetable that may see Firefox 5 being released by June 21st.

The documentation says “In general, each stage of the process (and activity pertaining to a particular version) lasts for six weeks”. Mozilla are targeting the aggressive Chrome release schedule with one of their own. In two years Chrome has developed, right up to Version 10 today.

Mozilla have listed four stages in the development cycle, Mozilla Central; Aurora; Beta and then release. It noted however that Firefox 5 will have a slightly different schedule, three weeks in Mozilla Central status, then five weeks each at Aurora and Beta.

“Rather than 6 weeks for mozilla-central, mozilla-aurora, and mozilla-beta we instead have 3 weeks for development on mozilla-central, 5 weeks to converge and stabilize on mozilla-aurora, and 5 weeks to validate on mozilla-beta” the documentation says.

Firefox 5 development started on March 22nd when Firefox 5 was released. The Aurora stage is due to start April 12 with the beta stage on May 17th and then the release on June 21st.

There are four update channels, nightly, aurora, beta and release. The nightly build is for “Mozilla developers and power users willing to risk massive instability to see and test the latest fixes.” Mozilla expect over 100,000 people to download the nightly. Mozilla expect the aurora build to have over 1 million users. The beta channel currently supports 2.78 million users and Mozilla expect this to expand to 10 million.

KitGuru says: The Firefox 6 development cycle will start when Firefox 5 is cloned from mozilla central to mozilla aurora on April 12th.

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