If you were hoping to test a near-finished version of the next major Firefox build before Summer was over, then you might be out of luck, as Mozilla has just announced that the release date for the official Beta of Firefox 3 has been delayed, due to performance regressions on the front-end development.

“We are driven by quality, not time. We want to Firefox 3 to be something that we are all proud of,” said Schroepfer in a statement. “The Firefox front-end has had significantly less development time than the platform and has yet to have the opportunity to innovate on top of infrastructure built for places, password manager, and others. So we’d like to give them until M8 to continue to develop user-visible features on top of the core infrastructure.”

In order to adjust to these changes, the roadmap was revised, and from hereon, Mozilla will release a new version of Firefox 3, every 6 weeks, until it reaches beta. The next version, after Alpha 7 is expected to be released in mid-September.

Given how long it took for Microsoft to “seriously” update it’s leading browser, I don’t think that they should be in a hurry, and I’m glad that they’re focusing on quality.