14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters used to testing very early development milestones of Firefox are undoubtedly familiar with the logo that accompanies the Minefield releases.
With or without the lit bomb fuse, the Minefield logo was designed to show that the specific releases of Firefox that featured it, were still far from finalization (it’s actually missing the fox to drive the point home).
With Mozilla looking beyond Firefox 4.0, the plan is to drastically accelerate the release cycle of the open source browser.
In this regard, Firefox 5.0 could be offered to users in mid-2011, Firefox 6.0 six weeks after that, and subsequent Firefox iterations six weeks apart after that.
As such, the entire Firefox development process needed a revamping. Part of the overhaul is the proposition to build new versions of Firefox with a focus on four channels, not three as it has been the case until now.
Christian Legnitto, Mozilla release manager noted the need to add the Aurora channel, to the existing Nightly, Beta, and Release channels.
It appears that the Firefox Nightly and Firefox Aurora testing releases will feature new visual identity elements, specifically fresh logos. (via Sören Hentzschel)
The new logos are certainly an improvement over the current Minefield design, and I cannot help but wonder whether the official Firefox logo will also be redesigned for the next release.
At this point in time there are no indications that Mozilla plans to introduce a Firefox logo facelift, but it has certainly happened in the past, and it will just as certainly happen again.
Also included in this article are the About Nightly and About Aurora dialog boxes. Below users will find Legnitto’s explanation of the Mozilla Channels post-Firefox 4.0.
"1. Nightly – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository every night. These are not qualified by QA
2. Aurora – builds created out of the mozilla-aurora repository, which is synced from mozilla-central every 6 weeks. There is a small amount of QA at the start of the 6 week period before the updates are offered
3. Beta – builds created out of the mozilla-beta repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to beta users
4. Release – builds created out of the mozilla-release repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to hundreds of millions of people."
Firefox 4.0 Final for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Final for Mac is available for download here.
