22 October 2009, 15:34

Mozilla confirms Firefox updates and beta delayed

Mozilla has confirmed that the release of Firefox 3.0.15 and 3.5.4 have both been delayed until Tuesday the 27th of October. The minor security and performance updates were originally scheduled to be released on the 21st of October, but are being delayed for further beta testing. Details of the planned changes in each update, however, have yet to be confirmed.

Additionally, the release of the first beta for Firefox 3.6, code-named Namoroka, has been delayed once again. Originally expected to be released on the 13th of October, Firefox 3.6 beta is now scheduled to be available at 5pm PDT on the 28th of October. Firefox 3.6 is a minor update to Firefox 3.5 that is based on version 1.9.2 of the Gecko layout engine. It will include a number of improvements to the browser's TraceMonkey JavaScript engine and page rendering, optimised session restore and several new CSS additions.

According to the Mozilla Releases wiki, the fifth beta of Mozilla's Fennec mobile web browser for Nokia's N800 and N810 Internet Tablets running OS2008 ("Maemo") is currently targeted for release on the 9th of November. Fennec 1.0x beta 5 will reportedly contain several localisation, plug-in and performance improvements.

The launch of the final version of SeaMonkey 2.0 is reportedly on schedule for the 27th of October following the release of the second release candidate (RC2) earlier this week. SeaMonkey is the successor to the old Netscape Communicator and Mozilla Application suites and includes a web browser, advanced email and newsgroup support, an IRC chat client and HTML editing support. Version 2.0 of the SeaMonkey "all-in-one internet application suite" is based on the same browser core as Firefox 3.5.4 and includes several new features, such as support for HTML 5 tags, improved JavaScript performance and off line data storage for applications.