Ten high priority bugs have been discovered within Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1, three of them labelled “critical”, but it won’t be decided until next week whether to release the browser anyway or restart the final stretch by issuing a second release candidate (RC2).

Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 launched on May 16th, but Mozilla has not yet committed to RC2. Previously, Mozilla said it is targeting June as the release window for the final version.

“We are making a go/no go decision early next week, as we are still collecting feedback [on Release Candidate 1],” Mike Schoepfer, Mozilla’s Vice President of Engineering, said in an e-mail Thursday.

On the mozilla.dev.planning newsgroup, Schroepfer also said that on May 27 Mozilla will either call Firefox 3.0 finished with RC1, or build RC2 with fixes for the 10 bugs that have been found.

In the meantime, testing will begin on the 10 bugs. “If we need to do an RC2, they’ll be ready to go,” he said. “If we ship RC1, we can get them in the 3.0.1.”

Bugzilla, Mozilla’s bug-tracking database and management system produced a bug list which includes three bugs marked “critical”. Eight of the bugs affect Firefox on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, while two afflict only Linux.

In Bugzilla, developers argued over the extent of the problem, which some users said seriously affected Firefox’s performance, as well as their systems overall and where the fault lay, in the browser or in SQLite, the database Firefox uses for its revamped bookmark and history feature, dubbed “Places.”

On Wednesday, in another e-mail, Schroepfer said that Mozilla developers were looking into the bug and were confident a solution had been found. “You can see that a couple different issues have been accidentally confused,” he said. “Overall, I think we have some good options to make this work well.”

Mozilla hasn’t upgraded the browser majorly since October 2006, but Mozilla may ship another version before the end of the year, Schroepfer has said, in order to add features that weren’t ready in time for Firefox 3.0.

Available in 41 languages, Firefox 3.0 RC1 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Mozilla’s website.

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