As it goes up against Google’s (News - Alert) popular Chrome Web browser, Mozilla has quietly released its updated Firefox browser a few days ahead of schedule. According to media reports, Mozilla released its Firefox 6 Web browser a few days ahead of its scheduled unveiling.

Firefox 6 was set to be unveiled Aug. 16, according to a report by the Inquirer, but instead it became available on Mozilla’s (News - Alert) FTP server over the weekend.

Following its announcement that Firefox would be put on a “rapid release” schedule, it later reinstituted the Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group on July 19. In April, Mozilla outlined steps for its upcoming rapid releases, but it hasn’t gone over well in some circles who say that rapid version changes will hurt enterprise adoption of Firefox.

“In large scale deployments, system administrators look for stability so that hundreds or thousands of machines don’t have to be upgraded every few months in order to maintain compatibility with plug-ins,” the Inquirer explained.

A July 19 Mozilla blog post explained Mozilla’s agenda to improve Firefox, conceding that the frequent updates create challenges for IT departments.

“Recently there’s been a lot of discussion about enterprises and rapid releases. Online life is evolving faster than ever and it’s imperative that Mozilla deliver improvements to the Web and to Firefox more quickly to reflect this. This has created challenges for IT departments that have to deliver lots of mission-critical applications through Firefox. Mozilla is fundamentally about people and we care about our users wherever they are,” the post said. “To this end, we are re-establishing a Mozilla Enterprise User Working Group as a place for enterprise developers, IT staff and Firefox developers to discuss the challenges, ideas and best practices for deploying Firefox in the enterprise. It will be a place to ask questions and get information about Mozilla plans.”

Firefox is available in more than 75 languages, covering more than 97 percent of the world’s online population with global market share of about 30 percent, according to Mozilla figures.

In other Mozilla news, TMCnet reported that the open source software backer is planning to build a complete, stand-alone operating system for the Web called Boot to Gecko, or B2G, according to a report filed on Business Insider website by Matt Rosoff. Rosoff wrote that it is being designed for mobile devices.

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