You may be confused when you hear the name Aurora because there is the Firefox Aurora and there is also the BlackBerry Aurora. The latter still remains but unfortunately for Mozilla, it’s dropping the Aurora release channel in hopes of making Firefox release channels simpler and the Developer Edition more stable than ever. If you’re familiar with all of them, there’s the Nightly, Aurora, Beta, and Stable builds. The Aurora brings the Firefox Developer Edition for the desktop but the company is now integrating some resources, the Aurora will soon be gone.
Updates for the Aurora channel will end today, April 18. It will be completely removed from the release cycle in the coming months. Nightly will stil have two cycles while some versions like Firefox 55 will migrate from Nightly to Beta.
The Mozilla team said there aren’t much users on the Aurora channel so it’s not really important. They can do away with it so development period can be shortened. That’s at least six weeks to eight weeks of work. Removing the unnecessary channel will quicken the process.
Mozilla’s streamlining of the process aims to get to the stable stage faster than ever. This is to bring the latest features to Firefox for both the developers and the users. It is good that the team is taking a good look at all the release channels because not everything is needed now. This change will bring developers a number of advantages like clearer choices in pre-release channels, higher quality and more stable environment for Developer Edition user, and faster release cycles for platform features.
SOURCE: Hacks.Mozilla
