Mozilla Firefox Update Channels: Nightly, Aurora, Developer, Beta and Release
Many people who are using Mozilla Firefox‘s nightly build called “Minefield” might have noticed that its now officially labeled as “Nightly“. The orange Firefox Menu button is also labeled as Nightly.
Actually Mozilla has redesigned Firefox’s update channel list. In past Firefox had following 3 update channels:
- Nightly – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository every night. These are not qualified by QA.
- Beta – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to beta users.
- Release – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to hundreds of millions of people.
But there were some issues inherent in the above structure:
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1. The quality expectation for updates on the Beta channel was vastly higher than the updates on the Nightly channel.
2. Users on the Beta channel may not even know they are running pre-release (but hopefully decent) versions of Firefox.
3. Due to #1 above, development on the mozilla-central repository is frozen while Mozilla stabilizes for an update to the Beta channel. This causes a huge backlog of patches and adds additional risk for the next beta.
4. 3rd parties must track Firefox development closely to know when a milestone they care about (such as feature complete, API freeze, or string freeze) is reached.
5. For developers, the tree rules are constantly changing on mozilla-central depending on when Mozilla last shipped an update from it.
Now Mozilla has redesigned these update channels and has added a new update channel “Aurora” to the list. Mozilla is confident that it’ll enable Mozilla to ship quality Firefox releases to users at a faster cadence.
UPDATE: Mozilla has introduced one more new channel “Developer Edition” which has been created specifically for developers. It comes with a dark theme and special features such as Valence (also known as Firefox Tools Adapter) and WebIDE.
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- Nightly – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository every night. These are not qualified by QA.
- Aurora – builds created out of the mozilla-aurora repository, which is synced from mozilla-central every 6 weeks. There is a small amount of QA at the start of the 6 week period before the updates are offered.
- Developer Edition – builds created out of the mozilla-gum repository, created for developers.
- Beta – builds created out of the mozilla-beta repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to beta users.
- Release – builds created out of the mozilla-release repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to hundreds of millions of people.
With the new structure, all these issues go away. The new “Aurora” channel has higher expectations of quality than the Nightly channel but lower expectations than Beta. The new icons should allow users to know at a glance what channel they are on and set stability expectations accordingly.
What do you think about this new updated plan?
Also Check:
What are Chrome Canary, Firefox Nightly and Opera Developer Versions?
??? so beta/aurora/nightly should be unstable???
I have aurora, it is more stable than my release firefox.
and it’s so much faster.
that sounds impossible, because the ‘real’ firefox is already very stable and fast.
^^ I’m using Nightly build and its very very stable for me. Never crashes.
I think it´s a fine thing to have so much possibilities. It fits almost every User Level and adventuresomeness.
I bought a secondhand T2Mobile Flame the year before because I needed the Dual-Sim feature and I liked the handling in Firefox OS. So I gave it a try. The former Owner switched it to “nightly builds” but I would feel better with the official release-updates. The latest Update of the nightly channel caused trouble and didn´t install.
Can you tell me, how I can switch to the release-Channel? Or is this a One-way with no way back…hope it´s not.
Thanks
^^ Check following page:
developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Phone_guide/Flame/Updating_your_Flame
I have a question.
Nightly is released in every night. I am curious about Is developer edition is released before beta? If it is, then what is the time interval between those releases? And What is time interval between beta and final releases?
^^ There is no fixed time interval between these builds. The difference is in stability.
how about the esr (Extended Support Release) update channel?
Hi, what the heck is going on? When I go Help..About Thunderbird…I am told I am up to date with version 68.2.2 (32 bit) then release notes. BUT every few days I get a drop down window from Thunderbird stating it can`t update and to hit the download button for a new version yet it is only downloading what I already have. To compound the trouble I use Sky for my main e.mails and I get messages from them stating it seems I`m using out of date version of my e.mail client and they will not support it after Dec 4th. Guide me please !
^^ It might be possible that some files were not properly updated, that’s why you are getting update available message regularly. I’ll advise you to manually download the latest version installer and run it to upgrade Thunderbird properly. It should fix the issue.