Firefox 1.1, the next significant upgrade of the popular open-source browser, will go into beta, or preview, in six to seven weeks, a Mozilla Foundation engineer announced this weekend.

Asa Dotzler, one of the ten original Mozilla employees, wrote on the SpreadFirefox.com site that version 1.1 will enter a developer-only phase within a week to ten days, with a "general preview" version five to six weeks after that.

If Mozilla sticks to this schedule, the public beta of Firefox 1.1 should show in the May 21 - 28 time frame.

"This release should be feature complete," wrote Dotzler. "We will certainly still have bugs to fix, but for most testers and reviewers, the feature set will finished enough that they can have a good idea of what's new."

If the foundation rolls out a beta of Firefox 1.1 on that timetable, it will have kept to its roadmap schedule announced earlier.

Besides general bug fixes, version 1.1 is to include tools for Mac users migrating from other browsers (including Apple's Safari), enhancements to Firefox's installing and managing of extensions, and improved patching procedures.

In other news, the number of Firefox downloads has passed the 44 million mark. The SpreadFirefox.com Web site again includes a download counter, this one dynamically updated via RSS.