14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is getting ready to release Firefox 7. Already, there are some builds available for download, though those may not be the final ones Mozilla pushes via its website and automatic updates in a few days when the release is made official.
Today marks the source code migration from the Beta channel to the Stable one. Along with the source code, builds have been created and published to Mozilla's FTP servers.
However, Mozilla won't be releasing Firefox 7 until it is sure that the binary builds are healthy and ready for distribution to hundreds of millions of users. If you decide to grab them now, you do it at your own, albeit probably small, risk.
Mozilla migrates Firefox versions from one channel to the next of fixed dates. Today, Firefox 7 moves to the stable channel, Firefox 8 to the Beta channel, Firefox 9 becomes Aurora and Firefox 10 shows up in the Nightly channel.
Last time around, Firefox 6 was pushed to the stable channel on August 13 but was not officially announced and made available for download via the site and automatic updates until August 16.
Mozilla may move faster this time, if it believes Firefox 7 is ready.
Firefox 7 promises several new features for Firefox fans, but the big touting point is the performance improvement. The latest Firefox will be a lot more frugal than what users have become accustomed to lately.
This is the result of work done on optimizing memory usage in Firefox and plugging memory leaks. It means that Firefox 7 is the slimmest to date, but it also means that you can keep it running for hours on end and memory usage won't grow uncontrollably.
In some cases, the optimizations show a 20 percent, 30 percent and even 50 percent decrease in memory use.
Be warned though that this doesn't mean that Firefox is perfect and that there are no more memory leaks. The memory performance improvement effort continues with Firefox 8 and Firefox 9.
You can check out the main new features in Firefox 7 in this preview.
You can grab what is likely to be the Firefox 7 final version from the links below.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.