Aug 20, 2011 07:46 GMT  ·  By

It has been a really busy week for Mozilla, which finalized a new version of its open source browser, and pushed three subsequent iterations of Firefox to the next level in their respective development processes.

The official Firefox 8 Aurora Build is now available for download, after the open source browser vendor had offered a preview release via its FTP servers earlier this week.

Firefox 8 Aurora is the latest future variant of Mozilla’s open source browser shared with early adopters for testing. It’s not designed for end users to run into production environments.

Mozilla plans to push Firefox 8 into the Beta channel around the end of September or in early October 2011, at which time, end users will have a brand and shiny new version of Firefox to play with.

Earlier this week Firefox 6 Final became available for download to the public. Firefox 7 will follow it in approximately six weeks, per the new accelerated release cycle that Mozilla embraced after the release of Firefox 4.0.

Firefox 7 graduated to Beta just a few days ago, and was offered to testers that want to take the next iteration of the open source browser out for a spin.

When it released Firefox 6, Mozilla discontinued support for Firefox 5, and the same will happen to v6 when Firefox 7 Final downloads will go live by the end of September 2011.

In the meantime, along with Firefox 6 Final, Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 8 Aurora, Mozilla started serving very early development Builds of Firefox 9.

Firefox 9 downloads are live only through the Nightly Channel, via the company’s FTP servers, but only experienced testers should run this release, since it’s essentially the equivalent of a pre-Alpha Build.

Firefox 8 Aurora, Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Windows are available for download here. Firefox 8 Aurora, Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Linux are available for download here. Firefox 8 Aurora, Firefox 7 Beta and Firefox 6 for Mac are available for download here.

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