Ride the Firefox development wave with Aurora pre-release builds.

Mozilla is transitioning to shorter release cycles and a more incremental development model. The organization aims to deliver more major Firefox releases this year, bringing the open source Web browser's version number up to 7. As they explained in our earlier coverage of Mozilla's 2011 roadmap, the transition will need much more intensive testing throughout the development cycle.

Mozilla has announced the launch of Aurora, a new Firefox release channel that is intended to open up experimental Firefox features to a broader audience of testers. The Aurora channel will serve up a stream of Firefox builds that are less fragile than the nightly builds but not as stable as official pre-releases.

Launching the Aurora channel and increasing concurrent testing is part of Mozilla's strategy for preserving its high standards of quality assurance as it transitions to shorter development cycles. As part of the transition to the channel model, Mozilla is also going eliminate the necessity for freezes on the mozilla-central repository in the work of stabilization effectively making it feasible for new code to continue landing in trunk throughout the whole cycle.

Mozilla has historicallyin the past relied on lengthy beta check periods and a large audience of volunteer beta testers to hammer out regressions and make sure that stable releases of the browser are robust. Moving to a time-based release cycle with faster iteration will obviously need more discipline and alter in the approach to pre-release testing.

Mozilla already offers a nightly build channel, which is codenamed Minefield. The Minefield builds are produced by an automatic build server based on the latest Firefox code in Mozilla's version control process. Firefox contributors and some adventurous testers routinely experiment with the nightly builds and submit bug reports to Mozilla based on issues that they encounter.

The nightly builds have long been a great way to ride the burning fringe of the Firefox trunk, but are subject to breakage. The quality of the nightly builds tends to fluctuate considerably throughout the development cycle. The shortage of predictability makes it usually unsuitable for day-to-day use.

Mozilla is offering Aurora as a more robust alternative to nightly builds with the objective of making early-stage testing palatable to a slightly more mainstream (and far larger) audience of application fanatics. There will still be lots of bugs in Aurora builds the whole point is to expand the pool of contributors who are helping to find such bugs but users will be able to count on it functioning each day without serious unexpected disruptions.

Users can expect to see updated Aurora builds issued roughly every five weeks. Mozilla will do a tiny amount of quality assurance prior to rolling out the updates in order to make sure basic reliability. In addition to being useful for testers and very-early adopters, the Aurora channel will even be useful to Web developers who require to experiment with implementations of the latest emerging Web standards.

The Aurora builds are available today for users to download and install. Mozilla has created specialized icons to help users visually distinguish between the various channels. I tested it on a Mac Pro, where I could trivially install it alongside the regular stable version of Firefox.

It fundamentally worked as expected, but there were a few minor ruffles. It will use your default profile, which means that there might be profile issues in case you are regularly switching between a stable release and Aurora builds. You may require to configure them to make use of separate profiles. Another issue is that the add-on compatibility checker in Aurora unsurprisingly disabled all of my add-ons. Users can install the Nightly Tester Tools add-on to override the version check.

For more details about the new channel process, you can refer to Mozilla's official weblog entry or the documentation in the Mozilla Developer Middle. You can download the Aurora build from the new Firefox Channels page.