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The Aurora channel never got as much traction as Mozilla anticipated. The original plan was for Beta to have 10x the number of users as Aurora and Aurora to hav
by cpeterso 10y ago
The Aurora channel never got as much traction as Mozilla anticipated. The original plan was for Beta to have 10x the number of users as Aurora and Aurora to have 10x the number of users as Nightly. Today, Aurora has only about 2x the number of users as Nightly and there isn't much difference between the types of user hardware or bugs found in Aurora compared to Nightly. Thus, there isn't much additional QA benefit when a Firefox release moves from the Nightly to Aurora channel. Most of the serious regressions are found in Nightly so Aurora is just six weeks of additional latency before new features and bug fixes reach the Release channel users.
The Beta channel is not representative of the Release channel user behavior or hardware either. About 60% of the Beta channel users are in India and Indonesia. The story I heard was that, years ago, someone distributed a CD with a Firefox 4 Beta among their friends in India. It went viral and those people have, unknowingly, been on the Beta channel since then.
- LeoNatan25 10y agoNightly is too unstable and beta is too late. Aurora was a more nuanced release, where it had some stability, while still had features that were long before beta appearance.
- nnethercote 10y agoI run Nightly on all my machines, and in my experience its stability is good. YMMV, of course.
- abrowne 10y agoI had used Beta for years, mostly on Mac, but recently I switched full-time to Ubuntu. I wanted some Gtk+3 updates that were only in Nightly, and now I've been using it for several months with a couple of crashes I can remember.
- cpeterso 10y agoMozilla has some projects in place to try to improve Nightly stability and catch regressions sooner. Chrome's Dev channel is a nice middle ground: Dev is just a ~weekly known-good snapshot of the Canary (Nightly) channel that has received some QA. Chrome Dev and Canary have the same major version number.
- dralley 10y agoI'm not sure what "beta is too late" even means, considering that it now occupies the exact position that Aurora did, that you claim is a sweet spot.