Firefox 5 In Aurora Channel

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:Only half as good as Chome

[Jugalator]

Won't happen. What *is* insanity today, however, is sticking to a yearly or bi-yearly release cycle when the HTML standards evolve faster than that. Shorter cycles implies less features indeed, but this also means that there's not as much to test before each release, so the risks of following the evolution of the web better isn't increased despite following it better.

This is basically a very simplified version of the Chromium dev's motivation to move to this.

But it's of course more fun to think it's a version number game. However, just wait 'til Chrome 27 and you'll see that version numbers will lose their meaning soon enough, just like Google and others intended.

Re:Oh god another version

[delinear]

For most sites Firefox traffic is much higher than Chrome traffic. Add to that the fact that Chrome is using Webkit anyway so will benefit from prior testing and development for Safari and it's far less risky to churn out major releases. At the moment Firefox is in a sweet spot where it's stable enough and with a big enough user base that I can justify supporting it to clients. If we get to the point where I'm having to support 3 or 4 versions of it with the later ones potentially breaking stuff that was working previously it's going to be a lot more difficult for me to make that case. Besides, Chrome has always pitched itself as leading the way on the experimental side of things (see Chrome experiments), while Firefox is meant to be the stable, open source alternative to IE. I expect things to occasionally break in Chrome but I'm always surprised when they break in FF.