14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters test driving Firefox 6 Beta, will get a new release to play with sometime in the next few days.
Mozilla revealed that it has been hard at work on the third Beta refresh for Firefox 6 (6.0b3), the next major iteration of the open source browser.
At the end of the past week, I told you about the availability of the second Firefox 6 Beta refresh.
Mozilla is no longer calling these such releases Beta 2 or Beta 3, as per the Google Chrome model, Firefox evolves from Nightly, to Aurora and to the Beta Channels before it’s finalized and ready for release.
Just as it’s the case with Chrome, the number of actual Beta updates is not important, with new releases within a specific development Channel considered refreshes more than entirely new Builds.
“Late last week we shipped the second [Firefox 6] Beta update. The third update is going to builds now and should be available in a couple of days. We’re about 2 weeks from the final Firefox 6 Beta channel builds,” Mozilla said.
“(…) The next migration will happen on August 16th. That’s just under four weeks from now so if you’ve got something you’d like to see shipping in Firefox 8, it needs to land before the 16th or it slips to Firefox 9.”
In parallel with Firefox 6, the open source browser vendor is also developing Firefox 8, but this particular release will still need to cook for quite some time, as it’s just one third of the way through.
Following Firefox 6 will be Firefox 7, currently offered to early adopters for testing through the Aurora Channel.
“The [Firefox 7] Aurora channel continues to stabilize with a handful of security and crash fixes as well as a couple of important spot fixes for Firefox mobile,” Mozilla added.
“Thanks to some really great (and fast) work by Release Engineering, we can now avoid shipping Aurora updates on days that don’t see any Aurora changes landing. Or put another way, we only ship updates to the Aurora channel audience when something’s actually changed in Aurora builds.”
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.