14 DAY TRIAL // It won’t be long now until Mozilla will announce the official availability of Firefox 7 Aurora, however, this had yet to happen at the time of this article. Still, early adopters familiar with the risks of testing a nightly build of Firefox, can already download Firefox 7 Aurora Builds from Mozilla’s FTP servers.
As I’m writing this, Mozilla’s official website designed to serve Aurora and Beta Builds of next iterations of its open source browser is no longer offering Firefox 6 Aurora downloads.
This is of course related to the evolution of the development channel for Firefox 6 and Firefox 7. As a reminder, Mozilla started merging Firefox 6 into Beta and Firefox 7 into Aurora earlier this week.
Even though some were expecting Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 6 Beta to be delivered a few days ago, July 5th, 2011 marked only the merge dates for the two channels, and not the release deadlines for the latest Aurora and Beta Builds.
“Yesterday (2011-07-05) was migration day and we did it without closing mozilla-central. That’s kinda cool,” a Mozilla representative said.
“We took about 2,100 change sets that had landed on mozilla-central over the last six weeks and we uplifted them to Aurora. Builds of the new Aurora [Firefox 7] have been generated and are in testing now. If all goes well with that testing, we should be pushing them out to all of our people using the Aurora channel on Thursday.”
The most recent Mozilla Engineering Newsletter makes several references to a date, 2011-07-06, which users might as well ignore altogether, since it’s most likely a small slip and not accurate.
If all goes well, testers will also get the first Firefox 6 Beta Build this week, with Mozilla planning the release for Friday, July 8th.
“We also took all the work that’s happened over the last six weeks on Aurora (and the six weeks before that on mozilla-central) and migrated that up to Beta,” the browser vendor’s representative added.
“Builds of the new Beta [Firefox 6] are also in the hands of QA and we hope to push those out to our Beta channel people on Friday (2011-07-06). The Firefox 6 Beta update will be for both Desktop and Mobile. We are now less than six weeks away from shipping Firefox 6 to the world. It’s gonna be awesome!”
As I’ve already told you, with Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 6 Beta offered to early adopters for testing, Mozilla is also starting the development of Firefox 8, which is currently in mozilla-central.
UPDATE: Added download links for FF7 Aurora.
Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Windows are available for download here.
Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Mac are available for download here.