May 23, 2011 16:01 GMT  ·  By

Firefox 5 offered the first chance to try an Aurora Build to early adopters of the open source browser. Soon testers will move along to the second Aurora development milestone for a new iteration of Firefox. Firefox 6 Aurora is getting close to release, although it’s not quite there, early adopters needing to exercise their patience a tad longer.

But with Firefox 5 having graduated to the Beta channel last week, Mozilla is also tending to version 6 of the open source browser.

Testers that understand the risks implied by running pre-release software can go ahead and download Firefox 5 Beta from Mozilla. The bits were made available for download just ahead of the past weekend.

Next on Mozilla’s plate is Firefox 6 Aurora. According to the open source browser vendor’s plans last week, the Aurora channel merger for Firefox 6 was scheduled to start later today, Monday 23rd.

Unfortunately, just because Firefox 6 is starting the transition from Nightly to Aurora doesn’t mean that the actual bits will also be available for download to testers. At least not just yet.

Mozilla made it abundantly clear that merge dates and release dates for the various development milestones of next versions of Firefox are not one and the same.

In this regard, although Firefox 6 Aurora is starting to take contour, it will still be a while before the actual bits are released.

The code needs to be tested against specific quality standards that would qualify it for an Aurora release. Only if said standards are met will Mozilla launch Firefox 6 Aurora.

By the looks of it, Firefox 6 Aurora should be released either by the end of this week or early next week.

In the meanwhile early adopters have the official beta Build of Firefox 5 to play around with until it’s time to start testing Firefox 6 Aurora. Keep your eyes on this space, or follow me on Twitter and I’ll let you know when that happens.

Firefox 5 Beta for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 5 Beta for Mac is available for download here.

Firefox 5 Beta for Linux is available for download here.