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.

Comments

Re:Preparing for a WebExtensions disaster in FF 57

[Kjella]

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.

And who has been the stewards of Gecko since 2003? The Mozilla foundation. They've had 14 years to fix it instead of pissing away resources on operating systems, programming languages, LBGT-bullshit (not the cause but making a software company into a social program), rebranding (moz://a, only 20 years after /.), piling up a dragon's hoard and so on. They thought ding-dong, the wicked witch (IE6) is dead now we can let our flagship product rot.

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.

Well yes, if you take a pick-up truck and dress it up like a sports car I'd rather have an actual sports car, since neither is a good pick-up truck anymore.

The extensions API was going to break anyway as soon as multi-process was fully implemented.

They could have made it a lot more backwards compatible easier by pretending each extension was in a one-window browser and said here's a new API for cross-tab communication for those who need it. Many extensions don't really need to know any other tab exists. It's only a full rewrite because Mozilla wants it to be.

You make it sound like this is something that had to happen, that market forces bigger than Mozilla forced their hand. This is bullshit, they had lots of choices to take a different path and ignored all of them. In their latest public fiscal year (2015) they spent $214 million of $417 million in royalties on software development. They don't say how many employees that translates into but certainly that's >1000 FTEs and they have $323 million in assets, essentially all profit that's funneled into stocks and property. They have tons of money and resources they could use to make exactly the browser they want.