14 DAY TRIAL // A new version of Firefox for mobile is expected to become available for download in a matter of weeks, Mozilla's Mark Finkle announced via a recent blog post. According to him, the company plans on making available for download a mobile version of Firefox 5 Beta 1 on or around May 17th, as they are trying to adopt the same release schedule as for the desktop version of the browser.
The development team is already working on the release of nightly builds for Fennec 6.0a1, and plans on creating an Aurora branding, and the release of Fennec Aurora 5.0a2 nightly builds.
While all these numbers and different versions and branding might be confusing, the idea behind them is a simple one, as the company plans on moving to a rapid release system for the mobile browser, which involves several new code repositories.
Currently, there are three update channels for Firefox, but Mozilla would move to a four-channel strategy, including: Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Release. More on them can be found here.
Basically, new in this equation would be the Aurora channel, with higher expectations of quality than the Nightly channel but lower expectations than Beta. Firefox mobile would adopt this strategy too.
“Like desktop Firefox and Thunderbird, mobile Firefox has decided to adopt the same schedule-driven release plan,” Mark Finkle explains.
“Currently, mobile is building “Fennec 6.0a1” nightly builds from mozilla-central. We plan to create an Aurora branding and start creating “Fennec Aurora 5.0a2” nightly builds from mozilla-aurora.”
However, the mobile branch won't be actively promoting Aurora, since, unlike the desktop Firefox, it does not have a significant user base for that. They would focus user testing on the nightly releases for the time being, but things might change.
The mobile team plans on releasing the “Firefox 5 Beta 1” browser as stated above, preceded by a pre-beta version, since they did not have enough time at their disposal to come up with the iteration from mozilla-beta.
“Normally, we would be building the beta from mozilla-beta, but we hit a snag for this cycle and will be using a one-time only fallback repository. In order to make sure things go smoothly, we’ll do a pre-beta build sometime next week, ahead of the official beta,” Finkle notes.
“The plan is to put the beta releases in the Android Market. The beta releases will install alongside the final releases, but will have beta-specific branding, to minimize confusion with the final releases.”
He also explains that, while desktop users would be able to move between Aurora and Beta channels at ease courtesy of a channel-switcher, mobile users won't be able to do so, and each release will arrive with its own profile, while running separately from other installed releases.