Firefox's final, stable 1.5 version will be released later this month or in early December, according to the company.Two free open-source Internet browsers, Mozilla's Firefox and its Macintosh-only cousin, Camino, released upgrades this week.
Firefox is now on its third beta version of its 1.5 version with Release Candidate 2, introduced on Thursday. The first v1.5 test version was released on Sept. 8, with Beta 2 coming about a month later.
The final, stable 1.5 version will be released later this month or in early December, Mozilla products manager Chris Beard told Ziff Davis Internet News.
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Camino 1.0 Beta 1, released Wednesday, is the first major update of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org's Gecko HTML rendering engine -- the same one used by Firefox on Windows and Linux systems.
The Mozilla team says it has "made great improvements, adding new features, improving existing features, and fixing many bugs and performance issues."
Mozilla said that while Camino 1.0 Beta 1 is usable on a day-to-day basis and a major improvement over Camino 0.8.4, but that -- as in any pre-release version of any software -- users may still experience bugs, or features that are not complete.
"The goal of this early release is to demonstrate progress, and for people to report issues early on in the development cycle so that they can be addressed," a project spokesman said. "That said, this beta is replacing 0.8.4 as the stable release on all (Macintosh) systems 10.2+."
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Camino 1.0 Beta 1 utilizes the same code base as Firefox 1.5 (the Mozilla 1.8 CVS branch), so it sports many of the security fixes and HTML engine improvements that are in that forthcoming final version of Firefox.
Due to several changes in the new feature set, Camino no longer supports Mac OS X 10.1. Mozilla advises users with OS X 10.1 to keep using Camino 0.8.4.
New features in Camino 1.0 Beta 1 for Macintosh include:
New tab bar appearance
Download pause and resume
Annoyance blocking (advertisements, popups, and more)
Certificate support for improved security
Java Embedding Plug-in for better Java performance
Form fill from the address book (using the menu item or optional toolbar icon)
History searching
Upgrades the Gecko HTML rendering engine from Mozilla 1.7 to Mozilla 1.8, resulting in performance, stability, and rendering improvements as well as Midas support
You can download the update for Camino here.
Firefox continues to gain market share
Firefox, which marked its 100 millionth download on Oct. 19, continues to gain market share slowly but steadily.
OneStat.com, an Internet traffic analyst and consultant, reported that Firefox's piece of the worldwide browser market has now topped the 11 percent mark—up more than 3 percent from six months ago. Microsoft's Internet Explorer still dominates, however, at 85 percent. Netscape, Opera, Safari (for Macintosh), and several others make up the remainder of the market.
"The global usage share of Mozilla's browsers is still growing, and it seems that Netscape users and some Internet Explorer users are switching to the Firefox version," OneStat.com reported.
You can download a Firefox update for Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows here.
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