April 14, 2011

Firefox 5.0 Aurora (Alpha 2) Released

Mozilla has released the first Aurora build of Firefox 5,  Alpha 2 on April 12th. Firefox 5 is the first release being done under Mozilla’s new aggressive development plan.  Here is how the plan works, there are 4 stages or development channels each approximately 6-weeks each with a total of 18-weeks from Nightly to Release: Nightly (Weeks 1-6) – the freshest (and sometimes unstable) developmental builds new features will be introduced during this cycle. Since Firefox 5 has moved to Aurora, Firefox 6 is now in the Nightly cycle. Aurora (Weeks 6-12) – all new features for this new version…

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A Quick Glance at Firefox in 2011

So back in February I posted about Mozilla’s new release schedule for Firefox in 2011. At that time the actual schedule hadn’t been fully drawn up yet as they were waiting on the release of Firefox 4. Now, I did mention the different channels or phases of the release schedule on the Firefox 5 Aurora Release post. Again these channels or phases are: Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Release and normally each phases lasts 6-weeks and will usually start on a Tuesday (except Nightly which will be the day after the Aurora release of the prior version). Firefox 5 is on…

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Firefox 4 Code Names

Mozilla has a code name for each of the major Firefox  builds usually named after national parks. Firefox 3.6 was Namoroka (National Park in Madagascar) while Firefox 4.0 is Tumucumaque (National Park in Brazil). Starting with Firefox 4, each release is going to have its own animal code name. Keeping with the Amazon theme, the next main update for Firefox 4 is going to be Macaw. You could say this would be Firefox 4.0.1, but Mozilla rather you not. They are trying to get away from the numbering as any time there is a security update (aka Firedrill release) this…

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Firefox 4 RSS Feeds

I don’t think I mentioned this change before. In Firefox 4, the orange RSS feed icon that used to appear in the address bar for sites that had feed has been removed. In its place, is a new ‘Subscribe’ toolbar button which does the same thing. However, the Subscribe button is not on the toolbar by default. To add, right click on the toolbar and select Customize… and then locate and drag the subscribe button to your toolbar. My only complaint about the new button is it should be orange (instead of solid black) when you can subscribe to a…

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Forcing Addons in Nightly 6.0a1

Okay, Mozilla is doing some funky things right now with the new update process. For those of you still on the Nightly (your Firefox button will now show Nightly instead of Minefield) builds, you likely noticed you just got bumped over to 6.0a1. I have no idea yet why we went from 4.2a1pre (which was suppose to be a ‘placeholder’ for Firefox 5) to 6.0a1. I’ll look into this more later on. In the mean time to get your addons working again: Open a new tab and type in the address bar about:config If needed click on the I’ll Be…

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