Firefox announce additional details about the channels for the new Firefox development and release process. With their major goal to deliver new features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster.
Recently there are three update channels, all of which contain updates:
Nightly – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository every night. These are not qualified by QA
Beta – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to beta users
Release – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to hundreds of millions of people
The previous approach has some major issues which enables them to modify and added Aurora channel:
Nightly – builds created out of the mozilla-central repository every night. These are not qualified by QA
Aurora – builds created out of the mozilla-aurora repository, which is synced from mozilla-central every 6 weeks1. There is a small amount of QA at the start of the 6 week1 period before the updates are offered
Beta – builds created out of the mozilla-beta repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to beta users
Release – builds created out of the mozilla-release repository, qualified by QA as being of sufficient quality to release to hundreds of millions of people
Aurora channel has higher expectations of quality than the Nightly channel but lower expectations than Beta. At the start of the 6 week Aurora period for a particular release, the quality will be closer to the Nightly channel. At the end of the 6 week Aurora period quality will have converged to match the Beta channel.
Phases of Firefox Development
From Firefox Blog:
The Aurora channel is where users can test the latest features and innovations. Users can expect an increase in polish from the raw, cutting edge features in our nightly builds. Aurora releases may not be as stable as beta or final releases.
See updates and available downloads at Firefox Channels.