Fourth beta before Firefox 3.1

If one recently could learn some information on the functionalities
which should be integrated into Firefox 3.2, the development team
intends to publish fourth beta for version 3.1.

Originally envisaged for the end 2008, Firefox 3.1 is seen again
delayed. Last Wednesday, Mike Shaver, director of the ecosystem of
development at Mozilla explained: "we will finalize beta 3 in the
current of the next week (...) a quatrème beta should be installation
6 weeks later in order to allow fuller tests for Tracemonkey, it video
and other very awaited improvements that we collected through the
returns of beta 3".

"A fourth beta will follow approximately six weeks after, as a vehicle
for more testing of [the] TraceMonkey [JavaScript engine], video,
Places and other eagerly-awaited improvements, as well as feedback
from Beta 3," Shaver said in a message on a company forum .

Shaver's decision to push out Beta 3, come hell or high water,
followed comments by a few Mozilla developers who wondered whether
it's smart to hold up Firefox for TraceMonkey fixes. One company
programmer speculated that minus the new JavaScript engine, Mozilla
could have wrapped up Firefox 3.1 by this point. "Without TraceMonkey,
we probably could have shipped 3.1 final by now, or, if not now,
within the next month," said Firefox developer David Baron last week .