14 DAY TRIAL // One of the ways Mozilla intended to make life easier for users of the Aurora and Beta channels and maybe get more people to start using the testing releases was with the channel switcher. Introduced with the first Firefox 5 Aurora builds, it enabled users to move from one channel to another with just a browser restart.
But now, just a short while after its introduction, the feature is dead, future versions of Firefox will not include it. The channel switcher is already built into Firefox 6 so it will probably remain there, at least until it moves to the Beta channel and possibly even longer.
"Upon reflection, the very users we want to reach are better served by having separate versions installed side by side than by having a channel switcher integrated into the browser," Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox Development at Mozilla, wrote.
"We want to invest our future engineering and testing efforts where they can best help our users. Given what we know now, it makes more sense to remove the channel switcher than it does to continue maintaining it," he explained.
The channel switcher is available in the About Box and makes it easier for users to move from Aurora to Beta to the stable version and the other way around.
But, it turns out, users don't want to move from one channel to the other. The ones that are interested in the development versions will more likely have both the Beta and the Aurora installed side by side rather than move from one to the other.
At the other end of the spectrum, regular users are unlikely to stumble upon the About box, find the channel switcher and decide to install the more experimental versions. Mozilla is then dropping the feature and looking at other ways it can get people to find out more about the different channels.