Mozilla has added a new channel to its Firefox release schedule in a move to release more browser software code at various stages of its pregnancy. The latest tweak to the open-source outfit's roadmap is another clear nod in the direction of Google, which is arguably winning the PR war on the browser front by refreshing its …

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Thursday 14th April 2011 12:05 GMT Anonymous Coward

Have to laugh

The idea behind Aurora is to provide a buffer for developers between Mozilla's shaky, early nightly builds and beta versions of the popular Firefox browser.

So "Aurora" is just another name for "Alpha" versions then.....

Gotta love marketing driods.....

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1. Thursday 14th April 2011 15:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
  
  Re: Have to laugh
  
  the difference is that the alpha versions have a channel, this means that you can have "nightly alphas" where you can fix a bug in a released alpha very quickly, instead of waiting until the nightly channel is safe (or stopping development work just to fix a stupid little bug).
  
  instead of a nightly "tree" with an alpha "branch" coming off every now and again, its more like there are 2 trees, but every few months the second tree is shipped off to beta and an exact duplicate of the first tree is made to replace it... ok, not the best metaphor.
  
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Thursday 14th April 2011 12:16 GMT Robert Carnegie

I believe Firefox has support for essentially old versions of their browser, who else does?

I mean obviously Microsoft does, Internet Explorer 6 being the extreme case. Opera, I think not so much, but I'm not sure.

It matters when businesses install the software and rely on it on multiple PCs, because if one of your business-critical tools isn't compatible with Firefox 4.x then you're going to want to continue using version 3.6.x for a while, and want to see security updates to it - there, in the form of minor new releases.

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Thursday 14th April 2011 12:16 GMT Anonymous Coward

Problem is

They will be even flakier and unstable than the final Firefox builds, which are hardly stable...

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Thursday 14th April 2011 22:14 GMT xj25vm

Marketing

For goodness sake fire all the marketing people and let developers get back to doing their work. OS was supposed to be the real thing, not more b**locks blabber and image control, like we are used to receiving from big software companies.

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Thursday 14th April 2011 22:15 GMT HMB

Nightly Release Cycle

So long as I've been eating enough fibre, I have a nightly release cycle too!

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Thursday 14th April 2011 22:45 GMT Anonymous Coward

I've been testing Moz nightlies from before the m/b days...

...and I admit to being a little disappointed to see Mozilla following Google's lead with more frequent versions/releases. If Google keep to the same versioning system they'll be up to v20something in a few years and it'll all start to look a bit stupid and confusing.

Fewer releases with more emphasis on stability and less on features should be the best way forward. Extensions can take care of features. The manufacturers can also add features via extensions if they want to.

We don't need another pointless bloat war.

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