14 DAY TRIAL // A couple of weeks after the Firefox 5 release, Mozilla is ready to make its regular channel migration. As such, Firefox 8 hits the nightly builds channel, mozilla-central, Firefox 7 Aurora is released, and Firefox 6 reaches the beta stage.
Mozilla is in the process of migrating all of these versions to their respective channels, though nothing official has been revealed. But if you know where to look, you'll find that the nightly releases are already numbered as Firefox 8 and that the first Firefox 7 Aurora build is here.
Granted, these releases are going to be of interest to the most adventurous users out there, but if you want to see the latest and greatest Firefox features and don't mind a few rough edges, Firefox Aurora is for you.
Mozilla should be making the official announcements soon enough, but if you can't wait any longer, you can grab Firefox 7 Aurora from the Mozilla FTPs. Firefox 8 is now available in the mozilla-central repository.
As for what to expect in Firefox 7, it's still early and some features are still being fleshed out. What's more, being that new Firefox releases come out every six weeks now, don't expect any huge advances.
A couple of things to watch out for have already been revealed though. Firefox 7 introduces a slightly tweaked AwesomeBar which gets rid of the leading 'http://' part and the trailing '/'.
This cosmetic change is similar to what Chrome has been doing for more than a year now. It makes regular addresses easier to read. For encrypted connections, the 'https://' part is still displayed, to make it clear to user that they're using a secured version of the site.
Another thing to look forward to in Firefox 7 is a memory fix that greatly reduces usage and should have a big impact on performance.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.