14 DAY TRIAL // While much of the attention has been focused on Firefox's switch to the rapid release cycle, all other Mozilla products have done so too, quite successfully, despite a much smaller team behind them and less resources.
Mozilla Thunderbird for example, has switched from a rather slow pace, with new releases many months or years apart, to the same swift, six-weeks gestation period as Firefox.
It took a bit longer than with Firefox, but the team has settled in and work is being carried out on all fronts, with Thunderbird 6.0 currently offered to regular users and Thunderbird 9 already in the newly-titled daily channel.
While channel names are still somewhat confusing, especially when it comes to Thunderbird, there is now an accepted official name for all channels.
When Mozilla decided to switch to the rapid release cycle, it announced several codenames for the Firefox branches that would be developed in parallel.
The roughest builds, where most active development takes place, are available via the mozilla-central repository and are branded as Firefox Nighly.
A slightly more stable Firefox version is offered to developers and early adopters in the mozilla-aurora channel, with builds branded as Firefox Aurora.
Moving up the chain, codenames are easier to understand, Firefox Beta is, well, the beta version and there is, of course, the stable channel too.
With Thunderbird, Mozilla took a similar approach. Active development is done in the mozilla-comm-central repository, with builds branded as Thunderbird Daily.
The most advanced version that is targeted at general users is Thunderbird Earlybird, under the mozilla-comm-aurora channel. The other two channels are Thunderbird Beta and the stable version, simply, Thunderbird.
Thunderbird will move the the "Daily" branding starting with the next Thunderbird 9.0 builds.
"From around the time of the Thunderbird 3 release, Thunderbird’s trunk nightly builds were code-named Shredder. Following the switch to the rapid release cycle, we’ve now changed these to be code-named Daily," Mozilla's Mark Banner announced.
"They’ve got a shiny new logo to go with them as well, which completes the set for our rapid releases," he said.