Mozilla 1.7 Final to Become Future Mozilla Development Foundation

according to this MozillaZine article:

In a newsgroup posting, Asa Dotzler has announced that the Mozilla 1.7 branch will become the new long-lived stable branch, replacing 1.4. The stable branch is intended to act as a baseline for developers building Mozilla-based products, with critical bugs fixed on the branch as well as the trunk.

Mozilla Firefox 1.0, a new milestone of Mozilla Thunderbird, a new Camino release and several third party Mozilla based products will be based on Mozilla 1.7, so the Foundation is making efforts to ensure that it is high quality. To do this, the branching of 1.7 from the trunk has been delayed by a week to Friday 9th April and the final release of Mozilla 1.7 has been moved out a month to mid-May. Between the branching and the final version, three release candidates of Mozilla 1.7 will be made available, much like there were for Mozilla 1.0 and Mozilla 1.4. These release candidates will ensure that the 1.7 branch gets more testing and QA work.

[Dana Baggett]