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Firefox 3.5 hits Release Candidate - should it be Beta?

By Sean Michael Kerner on June 18, 2009 9:21 AM

From the 'naming games' files:

Some vendors keep their software in Beta for a long period of time -- even calling services used by millions Beta (Gmail is still a Beta).

Mozilla however is now taking its Firefox 3.5 browser out of beta with the first official Release Candidate (RC 1).

Though, if you happen to have upgraded and just look at the 'About Mozilla Firefox' window all is states is version 3.5 (pic left).

There has been some discussion on the Mozilla mailing lists over the last 24 hours about the naming conventions for this release, and whether or not Mozilla should have just named it Beta 6 (or 7). The last official Beta release was Beta 5 which was released in April

"We *did* consider calling it a beta, and decided not to," Mozilla VP of Engineering Mike Shaver wrote. "One reason is that we don't want people evaluating it as "beta software" -- they should be holding it to the same standards as released software in terms of what they would report as problems, and we have seen an unfortunate number of "I would have reported it, but I figured it was beta so I'd see if it just got fixed next time" on bugs we would have rather heard about earlier."

It's an interesting concept and one that is not unique to Mozilla. In fact, Shaver comments that the same issue affects testing of the Linux kernel.

"Linus talks about this phenomenon periodically, as it affects the Linux kernel -- you don't get that last push of testing until it's declared as "done", so we're trying to walk the right line between "testers, please be very picky" and "world, we're not yet ready to call it Firefox 3.5"," Shaver wrote. "I think we've made a *huge* step forward in letting our beta testers be closer to our key endgame QA cycle here, naming nitpicks aside."

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