I had to chuckle whilst I was conducting a Google search when I spied an entry stating that Firefox 3 beta 1 had been launched. Someone happened to see that the "untested" beta 1 candidate of Firefox 3 had been put up on Mozilla’s public FTP servers and had submitted it to Digg thus causing all sorts of hooraw for a short period of time until the developers came out with this post at Mozilla Deveopers DevNews which luckily enough also got Dugg.
At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems:
- The release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group,
- we haven’t completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and
- these builds aren’t being mirrored properly on our servers.
With that said, I’ve been running the nightly builds of Gran Paradiso which most of you know is the codename for the next version of Firefox and I can tell you it’s going to be one heck of a browser. There’s way too much to get into at the moment and why spoil the surprise but I can unequivocally state that it’s fast!. I can also say that as of this morning the nightly builds went from alpha 9 to beta 2 pre-release in one single jump which means the beta 1 release is just around the corner. I’m guessing by very early next week sometime. Of course this meant I had to go and hack the three extensions I’ve been using in the nightly builds all over again but that’s become routine by now.
Good things are definitely worth waiting for. Dig what I’m saying? 
