14 DAY TRIAL // The first Aurora development milestone of Firefox 6 is literally just around the corner and could be made available for download in a matter of hours.
At the time of this article, Mozilla was continuing to offer Firefox 5 through the Aurora channel, but this is bound to change rather soon.
The open source browser vendor has had no problems migrating Firefox 6 from Nightly to Aurora, and as such, it’s planning to start offering the new Build to early adopters for testing today.
“We migrated mozilla-central to Aurora [6] on 2011-05-24 without incident,” Mozilla stated.
“Aurora builds have not been pushed to the channel yet. We’re going to do some quick clean-up and stabilization before turning on those updates, possibly as soon as Thursday or Friday.”
Testers that want to jump the gun on the first Aurora release of Firefox 6 already have the bits available for download via Mozilla’s FTP servers. They should look for Firefox 6.0a2 downloads, but know that Firefox 6 Aurora won’t be official until Mozilla releases, replacing Firefox 5 Aurora.
In fact, the plan is to serve Firefox 6 Aurora first and foremost to the testers that are currently running Firefox 5 Aurora. Provided that everything will go well, early adopters should start seeing Firefox 6 Aurora updates later today.
Meanwhile, testers still have Firefox 5 Beta to take out for a spin. There’s not much time left to test Firefox 5 Beta, namely less than a month, since Mozilla is right on track to releasing the final version of Firefox 5 on June 21st.
At the same time, development work has started on Firefox 7, which is currently in the Nightly channel.
“Last Friday (2011-05-20) we pushed Beta [5] out to a subset of our Beta audience, restricting the offer to 10% of those users. On Monday (2011-05-23) we opened the firehose and the Beta offer is now going out to all of our Beta users. As of this morning, we have 250K users on the current Beta,” Mozilla added.
Firefox 5 Beta for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 5 Beta for Mac is available for download here.
Firefox 5 Beta for Linux is available for download here.