Mozilla Corp. on Monday pushed back the release date of Firefox 2.0 yet again, with a scheduled ship for mid-to-late October.

According to the minutes of Mozilla's weekly progress meetings, there are approximately 40 bugs in the under-construction Firefox 2.0 Beta 2, and about 100 that need to be addressed before the final goes out the door.

Firefox 2.0 debuted as a developers-eyes'-only Beta 1 a month ago. Version 2.0, which will compete against Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 when that browser rolls out later this year, boasts an in-line spell checker, anti-phishing alerts, and a restore-after-crash feature, other improvements include enhancements to its tabs, news feeds, and extension add-ons.

Mozilla's Firefox release calendar now pegs Aug. 23 as the ship date for Beta 2, with Release Candidate 1 (RC1) due Sept. 19. At the moment, the final is slated to post for downloading on Oct. 24.

The company was upfront about the cause of the delays. "[The] slip [is] due to number of outstanding blocker [bugs] in several areas," the minutes read.

In the meantime, the release of Firefox 1.5.0.7 -- the next security update for the current production version of the browser -- has been moved up to the first week of September. "Due to Firefox 2.0 slip, we have decided to shorten the 1.5.0.7 release cycle to get it out before we reach release time for 2.0," Mozilla said.

The current 1.5.0.6 version of Firefox can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X from here.