Firefox 6 Beta Available for Download Now

The first Beta development milestone for the next iteration of Mozilla’s open source browser is close to launch.

Earlier this week, Mozilla revealed that it was planning to make available Firefox 6 Beta to early adopters for testing today, July 8th, 2011.

At the time of this article download of Firefox 6 Beta had yet to go live or to be officially announced by the open source browser vendor, but the Build is bound to be offered to testers soon enough.

Firefox 6 Beta preview releases have been handed off to the internal testing team at Mozilla since earlier this week. Provided that the internal testing goes well, and all quality standards for a release are met, Firefox 6 Beta will be made available today.

There’s also the possibility that the testing could flag some unresolved issues, in which Mozilla will postpone the release of the first Beta for Firefox 5’s successor until all problems are resolved.

Most likely, Firefox 6 Beta will land on Mozilla’s FTP server at a link such as this one ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/6.0b1/ (not live at the time of this article), so testers will be able to grab it a few hours before it’s announced on the Future of Firefox website.

For the time being, the closest thing to the actual Beta are the Firefox 6 Beta candidate releases, also on the company’s FTP servers.

In the meantime, early adopters can go ahead and download Firefox 7 Aurora and satisfy their thirst for testing. Firefox 7 Aurora was released yesterday, just as I told you it would.

Mozilla enumerated the latest changes in Firefox 7 Aurora:

“• Performance Enhancements: Faster startup time on Mac, Windows, and Linux

• Optimized Memory Use: ◦Improved memory management: For many users, memory use is reduced by 30 percent or more, responsiveness is enhanced

◦ The JavaScript garbage collector runs frequently to free up more memory when Firefox is idle

• Firefox Sync: Bookmarks and passwords now sync instantly

• Enhanced Font Rendering: Fonts are rendered clear and sharp.”

UPDATE: Download links now live for FF6 Beta.

Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Windows are available for download here.

Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Linux are available for download here.

Firefox 6 Beta, Firefox 7 Aurora and Firefox 5 for Mac are available for download here.