Developer edition is "Aurora". Aurora is alpha. Alphas have more bugs. It's not reasonable to tell me to use an alpha.
Excuse my ignorance, but is this official? I use FF Dev edition as my primary browser and it is very stable for me.
Context, if it helps: I am a web dev most of the time, and my browser usage is almost always >100 tabs or so. More than half of those have the devtools open all the time (each of which basically count as another instance of Firefox). My machine is pretty modest (i5, dual core, 8gigs RAM). I don't use many extensions though. Only a lightweight custom theme and greasemonkey + lots of custom userscripts. Reason I use dev edition is because it has more devtools goodies and ES6 features. Nothing related to extension development.
> When they bump the version number Nightly turns into Aurora turns into Beta turns into Release.
Not exactly. I guess you intentionally (over-)simplified that? Firefox actually follows trainspotting for their different release channels: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/04/trainspotting-firefox-37-d...
Aurora is alpha, but FWIW, I've been using Nightly as my main browser for over 4 years now without ever losing data, so Aurora should be more than fine.
It crashed on me twice in as many hours. I'm pretty hard on browsers since I typically have 200+ tabs loaded. That never happens with final release versions.
You can use the Firefox Developer Edition, which will continue to support the xpinstall.signatures.required preference allowing unsigned extensions.