14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters that want to get a taste of the next next next version of Firefox can do so with the help of a very early development build offered to testers through the nightly channel for the open source browser.
Firefox 8 is still quite a long way until reaching the general availability stage, so it’s in no way recommended for everyday browsing by end users.
Instead, the first preview release offered as a nightly Build should only be deployed in testing environments by early adopters that do not mind a bumpy ride when it comes down to software test driving.
July 5th, 2011 marked the official merge date for Firefox 8, synonymous with the introduction in the Central Channel.
But Mozilla is currently hard at work developing no less than three future releases of Firefox in parallel.
In addition to Firefox 8, the browser vendor is also working on Firefox 6 and Firefox 7, both of which will be delivered by the end of 2011 to end users worldwide.
July 5th, 2011 was the date when Firefox 6 started graduating to the Beta Channel, with Firefox 7’s migration to Aurora also debuting.
Various sources claimed that July 5 would bring with it the availability of Firefox 6 Beta and Firefox 7 Aurora. Obviously, this was not the case.
The reason for this is that July 5 was actually the merge date for Firefox 6 Beta and Firefox 7 Aurora, and not the launch deadline for the two development milestones.
It will still be some time before the fully-fledged Firefox 6 Beta and Firefox 7 Aurora are ready to be shipped to testers, which will be soon enough.
For the time being end users should stick to running Firefox 5, which is the latest finalized version of the open source browser.
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.