Asa Dotzler has posted a newsgroup message about the plans for the 1.8 release. As official Mozilla Application Suite development has ceased, the forthcoming Mozilla 1.8 Beta 2 release will be delivered as a set of alpha builds of Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1. In preparation for the release of the alphas, the trunk will freeze at the midnight between Tuesday 5th April and Wednesday 6th April Pacific Daylight Time. During the freeze, only checkins approved by drivers@mozilla.org will be allowed to land. After the alphas come out, the tree will remain frozen until the Gecko 1.8 branch is created, which is likely to be in couple of months time. Broadly feature-complete betas of Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 will be released from the trunk in mid-May. A localisation freeze will come in to effect at this point, meaning that changes to strings used in the Firefox and Thunderbird user interfaces will not be allowed (this will let translators get an early start on localising the 1.1 versions). The final Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 releases will come from the 1.8 branch.

[Via mozillaZine]