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Mozilla Kills Firefox Aurora Channel, Builds Will Move Directly From Nightly To Beta (venturebeat.com)
Mozilla said today it is killing the Firefox Aurora channel, six years after it was first introduced in April 2011. The move comes as, Aurora failed to live up to the company's expectations as a "first stabilization channel." Moving forward, the absence of Aurora will help the company streamline its browser's release process and bring stable new features to users and developers faster. From a report: The Firefox Aurora channel sat between the Nightly and Beta channels. Until now, Firefox development started with Nightly, which consists of the latest Firefox code packaged up every night for bleeding-edge testers, and was then followed by Aurora, which includes everything that is labeled as "experimental," then Beta, and then finally the release channel for the broader public. Going forward, builds will move from Nightly to Beta to Release. The Firefox Developer Edition, which the company calls "the first browser created specifically for developers," will be based on the Beta channel instead of Aurora. Developer Edition users should keep their existing profile, themes, tools, preferences, and "should not experience any disruption," Mozilla promises.
The latest Firefox market share stats are out, and things are looking pretty bleak. It looks like Firefox is now around only 5% to 6% of the market. It has next to no share of the mobile market (0.03%).
What's more, there are big changes that are supposed to be coming in Firefox 57. That's when there are plans to switch to the new WebExtensions approach for creating browser extensions. This system basically just imitates Chrome's approach.
There have already been concerns raised about broken extensions. Reportedly this new approach is much less capable than the existing approach, so it may not even be possible to port or recreate some existing Firefox extensions.
If this transition doesn't go smoothly, it could very well be the final nail in Firefox's coffin. Many of the remaining Firefox users are only still using Firefox because of legacy or custom extensions.
They may have to stop upgrading, if the switch to WebExtensions prevents their existing extensions from working. This, of course, would open them up to security risks.
The other alternative is to try to port these extensions of the WebExtensions API, which isn't much different than porting these extensions over to Chrome. If this happens, then there is absolutely no reason for these users to continue using Firefox. If their custom extensions now work with Chrome, they might as well just use Chrome directly, as it's a faster and lighter browser than Firefox.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were other teething pains that only become apparent when the final release is out.
The Australis UI changes a few years back were disruptive enough, and drove a lot of users away. The WebExtensions changes have the potential to be far more disruptive. Much like Australis, the WebExtensions changes are not something that users have asked for, but instead they're changes that are being forced on the users.
Perhaps the Firefox developers know that the WebExtensions switch could very well become the biggest disaster Firefox has ever faced? Perhaps it would even get to the point where these changes will have to be undone? Having a shorter release cycle would help mitigate the magnitude of this disaster. If everything does go to hell and the WebExtensions work needs to be thrown out just to save what's left of Firefox, then being able to get a new version out much quicker could really be a matter of life and death for Firefox as a viable software project.
Firefox really can't afford to lose any more users. Yet nothing about WebExtensions leads us to believe that it will attract new users, while it will surely drive away at least some of the remaining Firefox users.
Firefox 57 won't just be a turning point in the history of Firefox. It will be a turning point in the history of the web itself. It could very well be the release that takes Firefox down from 5% of the market down to the 2% or 1% range, at which point it would have to be considered completely irrelevant, instead of just mostly irrelevant like it currently is. If Firefox becomes irrelevant, then the future looks very bleak for Mozilla, too, as Firefox is pretty much the only project that Mozilla has that sees much use.
The statistics you are quoting are for all platforms, which you do acknowlege briefly. What doesn't come across though is that Firefox still has a larger market share than IE and Edge combined. It is the #2 desktop browser by a non-trivial margin. This speaks more to the dominance that Chrome has these days, than to the failure of Firefox.
It is completely understandable that Mozilla has moved toward Chrome in terms of UI, features and extensions. If Firefox and Chrome are too different, then any normal user trying Firefox after coming from Chrome will be confused, and not stay. This includes ex-Chrome users wanting their favorite Chrome extensions to work in Firefox. This interoperability may help Firefox steal users who have become disenchanted with Chrome. This is their only long-term path for survival.
Long story short, Mozilla is doing what it has to do with respect to extensions. None of this has anything to do with the article though, which is about Aurora.
Using Firefox in Linux is truly painful anymore, I quickly use it to install Chrome these days.
I don't use chrome, and am curious why you do.
1) When an employer's IT guy deployed it as the default browser, a few years back, I stopped using it (and installed Firefox) when a typo brought up a NSFW site - and then I couldn't get Chrome to dump it from the autocomplete (even by following their excuse for online documentation), where it insisted it be the top entry whenever I typed the first keystroke of a site name that started with the same first letter.
2) Like several appliances, its voice-typing feature forwards the sound samples over the Internet to servers - acting as a room bug. (Even if it doesn't do this all the time - and how do you know it doesn't? - it provides the infrastructure for trivial malware hacks to do so.)
3) The version on my new Android smartphone has a click-through license that includes an adobe license, which in turn constrains the user - for the rest of his life - to not compete with Adobe's products or work on security matters related to them. Accepting that (on an appliance that is identifiable as mine and no doubt "phones home" with the acceptance) would be a career limiting move.
So I don't use Chrome, and don't understand why any computer professional would.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I love the concern trolling that comes out with every piece of Firefox news. Mozilla has obviously lost the mainstream browser war but a lot of that is due to the fact that Google has deeper pockets and chose a base (WebKit) that was in better shape than the older Gecko was.
People still rage about Australis but then go on and say they switched to Chrome over it, while simultaneously complaining that Australis was a Chrome clone. Now, people will leave Firefox due to WebExtensions, which is... what Chrome uses. But the Firefox WebExtensions are extended (ExtendedWebExtensions?) to provide more of the functionality of the old extension system within a more modern API.
And the move to WebExtensions is largely due to the fact that the old extension model would be broken by the multi-process changes that have been taking place. Lack of multi-process tabs being one of the main points previously brought up by all the "Firefox sucks, move to Chrome" apologists.
The extensions API was going to break anyway as soon as multi-process was fully implemented. Mozilla made the decision to move to an extended WebExtensions API as a nod to the fact that many extension developers are familiar with it from porting to Chrome. But the Firefox version of the API will have abilities that Chrome does not have.
Firefox is still the only major browser that even nods the head toward respecting your privacy and the open web. It's still a perfectly good browser - it's my primary browser and I really don't have any issues with it aside from an occasional extension conflict. It's weird that so many people reflexively shit on it.