Firefox 6 Beta and Firefox 7 Aurora Next Week

Now that Firefox 5 has been wrapped up and launched to end users worldwide, Mozilla is shifting its focus on the upcoming releases of its open source browser.

Next in line is Firefox 6. Customers will still have to wait some six week for the finalized Firefox 6, but early adopters will be able to start playing around with the release as soon as the coming week.

Firefox 6 will graduate from the Aurora to the Beta Channel on July 5th, 2011, at which point Beta testers will have the bits available to them.

Most importantly, with Firefox 6 Beta available, users will get a taste of what the next major version of Firefox will look and feel like.

“The [Firefox 5] Beta channel is currently resting. Because Firefox 5 was a shorter than (the new) normal cycle, we’ve got two weeks before the next uplift from Aurora. In the future, all migrations will happen on the same day,” Mozilla revealed.

“The [Firefox 6] Aurora channel has seen a half dozen polish and stability fixes in the last week. There are about 30 approved for Aurora but not yet landed patches right now. If you own one of these, please get it landed or risk losing the approval. Aurora migrates to Beta in two weeks! Yes, Firefox 6 is very nearly done.”

Firefox 5 was released on June 21st, 2011, as initially planned by the open source browser vendor.

Per the Google Chrome model, Mozilla is now also working on multiple versions of Firefox in parallel.

With Firefox 6 Beta available next week, the company will also push Firefox 7 to the Aurora channel.

“[Firefox 7] mozilla-central continues to fly forward at a blistering pace with 415 changesets landed in just the last week (1450 changesets since the cycle began.) We are two weeks from the migration to Aurora (July 5th) so if you’re trying to make the Firefox 7 train, you’re gonna want to get on the stick,” Mozilla added.

At the same time, work will begin on Firefox 8, with nightly Builds offered to early adopters used to testing extremely early development milestones of Firefox.

Firefox 5 for Windows is available for download here.

Firefox 5 for Linux is available for download here.

Firefox 5 for Mac is available for download here.