Firefox 5 In Aurora Channel 161
blair1q writes "Mozilla.org has added a new intermediate development state, Aurora, to its Firefox development chain. Coming between Nightly-Build and Beta, it adds a fourth sense to the meaning of 'the current version of Firefox' (the Release version fills out the trope). And now they have populated the Aurora channel with what will eventually become Firefox 5. The intent is to reduce release-version cycle times by allowing more live testing of new features before the integrated code gets into a Beta version. The inaugural Aurora drop includes 'performance, security and stability improvements.' Firefox 5 is scheduled to enter Beta on May 17, and Release on June 21. Downloads of all of the active channels are available from the Firefox channels webpage."
Re:I'm really getting sick of this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is why Corporate America wont touch a .0 release and waits for service packs before upgrading.
Software quality has gone down the tubes. I would tend to argue (flameware here) that Ubuntu is beta level when it's releases have come out until a few weeks after the updates get it stable. Just my opinion since you cited it
Current version (Score:3, Insightful)
No it doesn't, most of us aren't testers. If you want to use the latest development build, alpha build, beta build or release candidate, do so, but don't pretend it's a release. That's just hyperbole at best. Me? I'll wait for the next release, and thanks to all you folks who are prepared to run intermediate builds in the form of mass QA.
This is all getting slightly ridiculous... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Only half as good as Chome (Score:3, Insightful)
I have 3.6, and it seems I'll be sticking to it until this "my version number is bigger then yours" insanity finally ejaculates and comes back to being a quality release rather then "lookie how fast we can release miniscule updates" like a premature ejaculator competition.
Oh god another version (Score:3, Insightful)
So they want to have two months between major versions, and expect all add-on developers to update and test, all web developers to check their layouts, web site and magazine editors to update their tutorials, useful forum posts to be obsolete, people get used to the new UI...
WTF is this shit?
Please win back the long-time users (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been with Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox from the beginning; custom builds, bug reports, tech evangelism, extensions/userscripts; I have made more than one offline XUL application for personal use (JS application programming before it was cool!); the whole ten meters. It had been so good for so long.
In 2008 a few things happened. 1. The extremely sensible and welcome features added in the 2.x release cycle, coupled with the unique browser landscape, ended up derailing the original goals of the project (streamlined browser, minimal yet viable for mainstream use, with robust extension capabilities for anything else anyone could want) back into some ridiculous browser arms race; 2. I switched to OSX and I think the memory problems are even worse there; and 3. Chrome started shaping up to be everything I wanted technically, with its new extension and built-in userscript support (even if it was inferior), its sandboxing, and its sort of remotely sane memory usage, even if it didn't have the warm fuzzy feeling I had from my closeness to the Mozilla project.
I am still so guilty about my switch to Chrome but I spend so much of my life in a browser window that I really had to go the practical route.
And since then it's just been getting worse and worse, with all resources going into either JS performance to keep up in benchmarks or features to be able to add some more bullet points to a release announcement. All anyone wants is better memory management, and then tab sandboxing would be nice after that since Flash/Silverlight can really bring down an embedding process. Give us some core improvements that aren't marketing driven and move all the AWESOMENESS into extensions that can be disabled after install! That's all anyone (on /.) wants.