Mozilla Corp. said developers have handed off the second beta of Firefox 3.0 to internal testing, and will ship the next preview of the open-source browser before the end of the year. The tentative release date for Beta 2 has been set for Dec. 21, said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla"s interface designer, in a posting to a company blog Monday. "If all goes well during the testing, Firefox 3 Beta 2 will be released on [Dec. 21] in the early afternoon, Pacific Standard Time. You can track our progress on the Firefox 3 Beta 2 Release Checklist," Beltzner said.
Mozilla dropped Beta 1 on users Nov. 20; a day later, Mike Schroepfer, the company"s vice president of engineering, said the goal was to get another beta out the door before 2007 ended. On Friday, Mozilla will hold one of its all-comers test days, where it asks for volunteers to run the beta through a series of stress tests.