14 DAY TRIAL // As expected, Mozilla is moving Australis, the major UI revamp, to the Firefox Nightly channel. People at the organization have already confirmed that the move was coming, but now we have a date, Monday, November 18.
Australis has been in the works for more than a year, but it's taken this long for it to be completed, at least enough for it to be tested more widely.
The move to the Nightly channel is by no means a sign that Australis is ready for the big league, but it does signal that the new UI is in the final testing phase.
You can expect some changes and definitely some improvements during its stay in the Nightly channel, but nothing major.
Australis has been available for testing, in binary form, in a Firefox build made by the UX team, but this will be the first time it will be used by default by any standard Firefox releases.
That said, there's no guarantee that Australis will also make the jump to the Aurora channel, five weeks from now. It's such a big change that it will need to spend at least six more weeks in the Nightly channel.
In fact, Mozilla has already prepared for it, and is running a separate Nightly build without Australis and that is what will get pushed to Aurora.
Australis may graduate to Aurora along with Firefox 29, in early 2014 and eventually land along with the stable Firefox 29 on April 15. So that will be the earliest that most people will get to see the brand new Firefox.
The new interface does have plenty of changes, compared to the stock Firefox and is much more customizable, or at least more easily customizable, but it's guaranteed that at least some Firefox fans will hate it, a few already do.