Ben Goodger has posted an update on the release of Firefox 1.0. Along with an expected release date around the second/third week of August. Definitely a good read for Firefox fans.
Most of the major work for what will now be called "Firefox 1.0 Preview Release" has been completed, and we"re driving a shortening bug list towards zero. We"re hoping to have a release in the second or third week of August. Internally (as in, as far as the Extension and Update systems are concerned) the release will be known as "0.10" and it should be noted that this is not 1.0 - this is what had been called (by the roadmap) "Firefox 1.0 Beta" and recently in the bug system "RC1".
On choosing the name we sought something that did not undermine the fact that we"ve never labeled any of our previous releases "alphas" or "betas" and despite their pre-release status have gained noticable usage statistics. We felt that releasing a "1.0 beta" may scare people away, so looked for something gentler. We paused on "Release Candidate" but it was correctly pointed out to us that doing release candidates when we know full well that all the content of RTM is not there is somewhat bogus. So we settled on that tride and true moniker, "Preview Release".