14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is firing on all cylinders, working on three different Firefox versions at a time, not to mention maintaining the stable version. With so much going on, it can be a bit tough to keep up, but Mozilla is providing a weekly round up, aimed mostly at Mozilla people.
Firefox 8 has just landed and already the progress has been good. There were several hundreds bug fixes in the past week alone. One particular Mac OS X bug fix should make Firefox faster in some circumstances for those using add-ons.
"We’re one week into the mozilla-central Firefox 8 cycle. In that week, we’ve taken some 400 change sets resulting in 320 resolved bugs," Mozilla wrote.
"We’ve flipped the preference to enable asynchronous layer-based plug-in painting on Mac OS X. This means plug-ins can paint without blocking the browser so we get security and responsiveness benefits," it added.
Firefox 7 is now in the Aurora channel. It still has plenty of weeks of work ahead of it, but the team is busy polishing the features that made it into the Firefox 7 branch, including the new Azure Direct2D for Canvas engine.
"Activity on Aurora [7] has been mostly limited to taking some late Azure canvas fixes to get the awesomely performant new version ship shape. We also snagged a couple of regression fixes for 'instant sync'," Mozilla said.
Finally, in the beta channel where Firefox 6 currently resides, bugs are getting fixed and the team is preparing for the second build update. The new version should be coming down the pipes soon enough and users should be updated automatically, unless they've chosen not to enable this option.
"The three million Beta [6] channel testers are about to get their second update of the Firefox 6 cycle. The update will deliver a couple of important crash fixes that should help us to start getting better data on the next level down of instability," Mozilla explained.
Firefox 6 is only about a month away now, plenty of time to plug all of the remaining holes, but the ship date is approaching fast and things must get fixed by then.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.