Firefox 2 Beta Not Quite Out Yet

By Brian Proffitt
Managing Editor

Several media outlets, likely anticipating the expected public release of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 this week, are reporting that the release has already occured today.

Unfortunately for Firefox fans, the reports of this release are premature.

What has been billed as the released code is actually a nightly build used internally by the Firefox development team. Thus far eWeek, Ars Technica, ZDNet UK, Digg.com, and Slashdot are among the media sites linking to this development version.

Developers of Firefox are asking interested users to not download this particular build, indicating that this build will not auto-update and, because it is not on the FTP/rsync mirror servers, continued heavy download traffic is effectively DDOSing the Firefox development FTP server.

The highly anticipated release of Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 is expected this week, and users are advised to await the official announcement from Mozilla.org before downloading the beta product.

Related Stories:

• iTWire: New Firefox Beta Due This Week(Jul 10, 2006)
• internetnews.com: Firefox 2.0 Bakes in Anti-Phish Antidote(May 31, 2006)
• Mozilla: Bon Echo Alpha 3 Milestone Released(May 30, 2006)
• internetnews.com: New Firefox 2.0 Features Line Up For Release(May 16, 2006)