The first release candidate for Firefox 2 Beta 2 made its appearance the other day which made me think the August 23 release date was plausible. It looks like they are pushing the release back a week, to August 30, to help fine tune some things (probably mostly with the visual refresh).
Mozilla has not announced this delay on the Developer Center yet but the calendar does reflect the new date.
Is the delay good or bad? I don’t think it is good that they are running into so many unexpected problems but I am glad they are not rushing to release a version that would be unusable to a lot of people. Being that it is still in Beta there will be some bugs but I would expect most of them to be “under-the-hood.” By this point I hope many users will be able to use Beta 2 as their everyday browser. I have been using Firefox 2 as my primary browser ever since Alpha 1 and I have been amazed at the stability that the nightly builds have had (with the exception of a few versions that crashed a lot 
).
Just like Windows Vista we need to give Firefox 2 some time to fully develop itself. In my opinion this will be the best version of Firefox that has ever been released and the same goes for Vista.
Thanks for noticing this James!
I normally use a program when its in beta except for firefox. Since i use it every day, i just want it to work right and not have to load a page in IE because it doesnt work in firefox.
I switched it today to my default browser and thanks to dedicated developers and the nightly tester tools I’ve got all my ad-ons – except for those which this release meant I didn’t need anymore!
I’m glad you made the switch and the Nightly Tester Tools is definitely the best extension ever! I even use that extension on my Firefox 1.5 because there are some extensions that never get updated but still work fine.
That’s true, especially [addons.mozilla.org]
Heh well momokatte has been MIA for some quite time except briefly once due to work and other things so it is no surprise if his extensions like Firesomething is behind.
The 2.0 beta 2 test release is actually planned on midday Thursday Aug.31
[wiki.mozilla.org]
“we’ll start l10n smoketests next Monday and builds available midday on Wednesday, then mirroring and everything means that we’d be looking at a release midday on Thursday (Aug 31)”