In order to make sure that the Firefox 1.5 release is of the highest quality, and to get some very widespread testing of our update system, we're inserting one additional beta into the schedule. If all goes well, we'll have wrapped up our Firefox 1.5 beta 1 by next week. After that, we'll take some time to respond to the feedback we get and ship a second beta sometime in the following three or four weeks. After that, we'll have our final release candidates and then Firefox 1.5.
If you know of any serious issues with update that should be taken care of before beta 1, please nominate those using the blocking1.8b4? flag in Bugzilla. If you know of serious bugs that don't impact our update system, consider nominating them for the second beta by setting the blocking1.8b5? flag. (I know those flags are a bit confusing -- they refer to the core Mozilla/Gecko code and not the Firefox application version. Just remember that 1.8b4 is Firefox 1.5 beta 1 and 1.8b5 is Firefox 1.5 beta 2.)
This does mean that our schedule will be pushed out a bit further but the added testing and bugfixing will help to ensure that Firefox 1.5 is of the highest possible quality and that all future updates and upgrades are easy and convenient for our tens of millions of users.
You can read more about the schedule specifics over at the developer news blog.
