Early adopters ready to jump at the chance of downloading the first Beta development milestone of Firefox 5 will be able to do so quite soon.

According to Asa Dotzler, Director of Community Development at Mozilla, “Firefox 5 Beta builds are not available yet, but will be in a few days.”

A specific availability deadline wasn’t provided, but despite this, it does sound like early adopters won’t have to wait all that long until they’ll be able to take Firefox 5 Beta out for a spin.

And this is the fully-fledged beta Build of Firefox 5, not the trial that Mozilla has already released to testers, asking them to test drive the new channel switcher feature.

Earlier this month I told Softpedia readers that Firefox 5 Beta was just around the corner pointing to the May 17th, 2011 date.

While the Beta is indeed very close, May 17 brought with it the merge to the Beta channel for Firefox 5 Aurora.

As the open source browser vendor was kind enough to explain, merge dates and release dates are not one and the same, and it was my mistake for assuming that they were.

Mozilla started the mozilla-aurora → mozilla-beta source code merge migration on May 17th and wrapped up the process the very same day.

This means that Firefox 5 is in the final stages of cooking and will be provided to testers quite soon. Mozilla stressed that it needs a few days, typically less than a week after the merge date in order to have a release ready to offer to early adopters.

With Firefox 5 hitting Beta, it’s important to note that the next major iteration of the open source browser is getting closer and closer. Mozilla continues to say that Firefox 5 Final will be available for download on June 21st.

Firefox 5 Beta 1 Trial and Firefox 4.0 Final for Windows are available for download here.

Firefox 5 Beta 1 Trial and Firefox 4.0 Final for Mac are available for download here.

Firefox 5 Beta 1 Trial and Firefox 4.0 Final for Linux are available for download here.