To reduce the release Overhead, Mozilla has decided to discontinue Aurora channel –which is part of Firefox release cycle — and merge with Beta, keeping Devedition themes. This will happen on April 18, 2017. The company calls this as Dawn Project.
With this, the Firefox release cycle comes down to three release channels from four: Nightly > Beta > Stable. Nightly will spent an additional 6 weeks. And the Beta now becomes the first stabilization phase after Nightly (which used to be Aurora till now). This change will affect Firefox on desktop, Android, Thunderbird and Seamonkey products as well.
Firefox Developer Edition’s Dark theme for Chrome is here
Atm, Release train versions : Nigthly 55, Aurora 54, Beta 53
After the merge day, Release train versions will become: Nightly 55, Beta 54 , Stable 53. You can find the changed Firefox 2017 release schedule below.
Firefox 53 Release Date changed to April 19 from 18
The Reason for Firefox Aurora channel removal
“With significant improvements in stability and performance in the Nightly channel we have determined that we tend to gain more time by testing and localizing in Nightly and stabilizing in Beta. The increased speed to market and resulting quality and stability in the Beta channel is why Aurora is going to be discontinued on April 18 (next merge day, exceptionally on Tuesday). ” Mozilla’s engineer Francesco Lodolo said in a thread on the Google groups forum.
Developer edition will be migrated to Beta
“Between April and June, Firefox on desktop will continue to receive updates for critical security issues and the Aurora and Developer Edition populations will be migrated to the Beta update channel. On Android, Aurora users will be migrated to Nightly.”
Offline Installer Links for Firefox Nightly, Aurora, Beta and Release Channels [Updated]