Did A Google Earth Mistake Cause A Couple's Brutal Murder?
Tumblr 101: Tips And Tricks To Get Started
First Firefox 6 build next week, Firefox 7 by May, and aurora channel introduced
Along with the faster 6-week release cadence, Firefox's new Chrome-like release channels have also been given names and anticipated update frequencies. The most notable change is the introduction of a new alpha channel -- which is analogous to Chrome Canary -- that will be called 'aurora' and will update nightly. Aurora will be where fixes and features are tested, and either approved for Beta, or backed out to Central. Aurora will have a new icon, too.
The Nightly (mozilla-central) channel will remain unchanged in name and frequency, but it will gain a new 'nightly icon.' The Beta (mozilla-beta) channel will remain as-is, with new builds rolling out weekly. The Release (mozilla-release) channel will also remain as-is, with security and stability updates coming every 6 to 12 weeks.
It should be noted that the names (including 'aurora') are not necessarily final, but it's unlikely that they'll change. We're also awaiting the arrival of the new 'channel switching' technology, which should arrive in the next few days -- in time for the release of Firefox 6 aurora!
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentsmattEhornApr 7th 2011 6:04AM
Mozilla sounds like they are going to be pretty busy for the rest of the year. I can't believe all of the new releases that will be gracing our presence shortly.
Any news on what the new releases will entail?
SlashZakuApr 7th 2011 7:44AM
I'm actually looking forward to the current a1 getting into the main. Firefox 4.0 runs sluggish for me but on this same computer, Minefield 4.2a1 runs fine. So whatever changes there are between the 2 seem to fix what I'm having with 4.0.
So is Minefield the mozilla-central build or the mozilla-beta build? Just want to know so I know which one to nab when this gets rolling (along with Aurora or whatever they decide to call it).
SlashZakuApr 7th 2011 7:51AM
@SlashZaku
Stupid question as it's in the chart and I just checked the FTP. Minefield seems to be the current mozilla-central and the mozilla-beta will be added later.
JeffreyApr 7th 2011 8:11AM
It looks like they just renamed the Experimental channel to Aurora.
wtheckTOOFASTApr 7th 2011 6:48PM
I think Mozillla is increasing Firefox versions a bit too fast. They definitely will not see quick adoption of newer versions unless Firefox is now designed to automatically upgrade to a newer version. Anyways, with a release almost every month, Firefox is going to run out of version numbers soon. I guess they're trying to make Firefox appear more mature since IE is at version 9, Opera at 11, and Chrome at 10.
infinityApr 13th 2011 2:20PM
@wtheckTOOFAST i'd be more worried about Chrome running out of numbers.. all of them still have a way to go before that's a concern at all though..... maybe we will see chrome version 1000.0.100.11 in our lifetimes even ;)
XenoApr 7th 2011 9:17PM
are you... What(!?) already(?)
HarshApr 8th 2011 5:14PM
@mattEhorn
Firefox 5 will include a lot of performance tune-ups that didn't make it into Firefox 4
* HTML5 graphics: Will be as fast or very close to IE9 on more of their test drive benchmarks.
* JS: On the whole will be 10-20% faster as they turned PGO on for their js engine.
* Dom: Improved results in Dromaeo Dom benchmark
* CSS: 5-15% faster generally, due to internal cleanups to CSS engine
* JPEG image decoding: up to 200-300% faster. They use jpeg-turbo library now.
* Memory management should be slightly lower. Ongoing work in this area is starting to speed up again like it did a couple years ago for FX3.
* Connection latency should be improved as they turned on a feature that chrome implemented some time ago, where they send a second packet within ~250ms if there's no reply in creating a connection, instead of waiting for the packet to timeout which can take entire seconds. Results in slightly snappier real world browsing, less random slowdowns.
* Disk IO: They turned on a feature where most of the disk cache files will be allocated before writing to the disk. Should reduce file fragmentation significantly for Firefox profiles.
* CPU efficiency: they've done work to reduce the JS/GFX strain background tabs can put on the CPU. Should improve Firefox's performance on laptop battery tests at least a small bit and help with UI interactivity.
* Some more web standards supported: some CSS3 stuff and some HTML5 form features.
* Much more, and keep in mind that Fx5 is a smaller release compared to what Fx6 and 7 should be.