Firefox 24: The Road to Australis

 
 
By Sean M. Kerner  |  Posted 2013-08-21 Email Print this article Print
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The open-source Mozilla Firefox Web browser has its roots in the Netscape browser that has long since faded from active use on the Web. Firefox has evolved significantly over the years from that historical base to become a leading light in the development of new Web technologies. That evolution has accelerated significantly since 2011, when Mozilla moved to a rapid release process with new browser updates coming approximately every six weeks. In the rapid release model, there are multiple release channels through which development is pushed. At the bleeding edge of development is the Nightly release, where as the name implies, new builds are made every night. The Aurora channel is what in other development environments would be known as the Alpha channel. There is also the Beta channel, which is currently gearing up for the Firefox 24 release. Finally, there is the stable Firefox release channel which was recently updated for Firefox 23. A guiding light for the current set of Firefox releases in development is an effort known as Australis. The Australis overhaul will include new user interface components. eWEEK examines Firefox's route to Australis.

 
 
 
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3 Comments for "Firefox 24: The Road to Australis"

  • Bill Swallow August 27, 2013 9:05 am

    I'm SysAdmin for a small group in a big company. Our group builds web sites and web apps for multiple clients. Our company standardized on IE as the default browser, but as a web dev group, when I build a new baseline image (Win 7 Enterprise x64 SP1), I install IE (8 or 9), Firefox, and Chrome, and load them with a default set of bookmarks, then hit each site to test and 'prime the pump'. IE and Chrome work flawlessly. For the last several releases, though, Firefox (23.0.1 on my last build) has been nearly useless. Pages that pop up instantly on IE or Chrome either take forever to load on Firefox, or don't load at all, or crash. Don't know if it's Firefox getting crappy in recent days, or the squabbling with Oracle over Java, and I don't really care. I used to be a huge proponent of Firefox, but I can no longer recommnend it to my users or customers. Mozilla seems to be far more interested in jacking up their version numbers than in fixing problems, and their public statements that corporate users can go to hell certainly did nothing to help.

  • Ronin August 22, 2013 4:27 pm

    Sorry, that was just a useless slideshow. Evoked no interest and provided very little hard information. To me it was just a useless piece of fluff designed to take up space and really only show advertising links on the right hand side... Also, page design overall is terrible - I had to reload the page 3 times with NoScript - each time telling it to Temporarily Allow All this Page before all the scripts finally loaded - and I just can't see the need for so many scripts

  • Bob August 22, 2013 11:54 am

    1. Please get rid of the GARBAGE in the slide-show. 2. Make the image of each screen as large as possible. 3. Please don't go to the next screen until the reader clicks on an "ADVANCE" button.num

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