Mozilla’s New Firefox 5 Aurora to Beta plan is working out

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Count me among those that have been a bit skeptical about Mozilla’s new rapid release cycle.

You can also (potentially) now tell me that I’m wrong too.

Part of the Mozilla Firefox 5 rapid release cycle involves a regular and routine merge of code from the Aurora development tree to the Beta tree at set intervals.

The first aurora to beta merge occurred today, on time and on schedule.

“Aurora->Beta merge for Firefox 5 is complete,” Johnathan Nightingale, Director of Firefox Engineering at Mozilla tweeted. “These trains run on time.”

As a guy that has worked as a developer and managed developers, I know full well that moving to a new dev cycle is no easy task. Sure the next step, moving from Beta to GA is an almost bigger step, but hey…you gotta start somewhere.

Beta doesn’t mean feature or string freeze for Mozilla (not yet anyways), but it does mark the fastest nightly lockdown (aurora isn’t quite the same as nightlies but..) to beta in the history of the Mozilla project AFAIK.

Now all of us sitting in the cheap seats get to watch as the train picks up speed and hits the release station. Then again, open source development doesn’t need to be a spectator sport, we can all choose to get the beta (when available) and help Mozilla and ourselves improve Firefox 5.