When we push an update containing Firefox 5 to users on the beta channel, one major concern is add-on compatibility for existing Firefox beta users. The add-ons team has a detailed plan to address the concern in our new rapid release process.

To put that plan into action, there are tools that need to be updated and testing that needs to take place. The tools seem to be on track to be finished today, and hopefully testing should take less than a week.

The mozilla-beta merge date is May 17th and the update will come out some short time thereafter. We have decided to wait until the add-on compatibility changes are put into place before offering the update to users on the beta channel.

If issues are found and it looks like the compatibility changes/qualification will take longer than a week, we will offer the update to users without the compatibility changes in place. To mitigate risk, we would throttle the update offer to a percentage of users in this case.

At this time, there is no change to the planned release of the Firefox beta update.