14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is hard at work on overhauling the existing release process for Firefox with a strong focus on accelerating the pace at which major new iterations are served to the public.
Christian Legnitto, Mozilla release manager has posted a new draft detailing the development specifics of future versions of Firefox.
According to the proposed development and release timetable, early adopters will be able to get the first taste of Firefox 6.0 and Firefox 7.0 quite soon.
The open source browser vendor has introduced a new repository namely Mozilla Aurora, in addition to Central, Beta and Release.
According to Legnitto, mozilla-central will deal mainly with “general development; project repository merges.”
Mozilla-aurora will be focused on “preffing off and backing out fixes/features which the central channel exposes as problematic with a wider audience.”
In mozilla-beta the browser vendor will work on “fixes for newly-found issues which would prevent a final release and in extreme cases backouts / pref offs.”
All the while, mozilla-release will be reserved for “cloning if a rapid response release is needed.”
The plan is to have each new Firefox release spent 6 weeks in each of the repositories detailed above.
The only exception is Firefox 5.0, the successor of Firefox 4.0, which is also the first version of the open source browser to be built per the new development and release process.
“Firefox 5 will be slightly different from future releases due to the development overlap (or lack thereof) with Firefox 4,” Legnitto said.
“Rather than 6 weeks for mozilla-central, mozilla-aurora, and mozilla-beta we instead have 3 weeks for development on mozilla-central, 5 weeks to converge and stabilize on mozilla-aurora, and 5 weeks to validate on mozilla-beta.”
Firefox 5.0 could be released as early as June or July 2011, with future versions of the browser succeeding one another at a much faster pace.
Development on mozilla-central for Firefox 6.0 could start on April 12, which means that next week, early adopters could have the first Build for testing.
And Firefox 7.0 won’t be all that far behind, with mozilla-central planned to start on May 17th.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Mac is available for download here.
