Mozilla are planning to release Firefox 6.0 to the web later tomorrow, 2 months after Firefox 5.0 made it"s way out of beta and a month after 5.0.1 was released in July.
Mozilla introduced two beta channels (much like that of Google Chrome) called Beta and Aurora respectively after Firefox 4.0 shipped, which has sped up their release cycle dramatically; they also have a "Nightly" channel which are development versions made available to testers without the quality assurance testing the other two channels do get. The main difference being that the beta channel can be considered a stable version of what will be the next version of Firefox, while Aurora is more of a beta version of the next release after that! Both channels will also have undergone quality assurance before being made available on the Future Releases website.
But it"s all go for Mozilla at the moment, with Firefox 7.0 already in development and 8.0 on the way.
The beta channel is expected to be updated to Firefox 7 this week after 6.0 ships, and as we reported last week, from a blog post written by Nicholas Nethercote, one of Mozilla"s programmers, claims that Firefox 7 will have a solution that many users of the web browser will be happy to hear. He says, "Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20 (percent) to 30 (percent) less, and sometimes as much as 50 {percent) less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs."
But for now enjoy Firefox 6.0, which can be downloaded below. If you were wondering why you need to upgrade from Firefox 4 or 5, we can remind you that Mozilla have also fast tracked dropping their support for older browsers, with 4.0 already laid to rest.
Changelog:
Download: Firefox 6.0 for Windows | 13.1 MB or Firefox 6.0 for Mac OS X | 28 MB
Download: For other Systems & Languages (Live on 16 Aug)
View: Release Notes
Update: Apologies, the update will in-fact officially ship tomorrow, not today as we previously reported!