May 5, 2011 08:08 GMT  ·  By

The first Beta development milestone of Firefox 5 is extremely close, but it’s not quite there yet, despite a recent update pushed to Beta testers by Mozilla. Following the advent of Firefox 4.0, Mozilla overhauled the development and release process of future versions of the open source browser, aiming to deliver new iterations of Firefox six weeks apart.

Firefox 5, Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 will all be finalized and delivered to end users by the end of this year, according to the open source browser vendor.

Development has already started on Firefox 5, with the first Beta Build set for launch later this month. In this regard, it might come as a surprise that Mozilla has already released bits labeled as Firefox 5 Beta 1.

Fact is that they didn’t. The Beta update offered is nothing more than a Trial release of Firefox 5 Beta 1. Moreover, the release is not even a Beta, it’s simply a rebranded Firefox 5 Aurora Build designed to let early adopters test the channel switcher feature of the browser.

“We’d like to extend this release to our beta users and help test the new Firefox development channel switcher feature,” revealed Christian Legnitto, Firefox release manager.

“To test the channel switcher, users can try to switch to the aurora channel and back to the beta channel. Please note that this release is NOT the final beta of the next version of Firefox. This build is a copy of aurora re-packaged as beta for testing.”

Testers need to go to Help in the Firefox menu and select About Firefox. In the About Firefox box they should opt to change the Channel from Beta to Aurora, and then back.

Similarly, if they’re running Firefox 5 Aurora, in the About Firefox dialog box they should opt to switch to Beta, and then back.

“Mozilla Firefox is moving to a rapid release development cycle to deliver new features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster,” Legnitto added.

“To help with this, Mozilla recently launched the Firefox Aurora channel to give users more opportunities to participate in building Firefox. The Aurora channel is where users can test early stage features for future versions of Firefox without all the polish and stability of a beta release.”

Once again, this release is not the fully-fledged Beta of Firefox 5, but just a Trial Beta put together with an Aurora release.

Mozilla will release Firefox 5 Beta on May 17th, 2011 and will wrap up and serve the final Build of Firefox 5 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.