6 is in beta now. Nightlies were 7.0a a few days ago, but if you update.... yep, 8.0a1

PS. Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac. I actually use it in production, for no other reason than I was testing it and have no reason to get an old release since it's never crashed and is incredibly fast.

Can echo that Nightly (8) is very stable on Windows, too.

Same goes for Linux. This build is quite stable and starts in a snap.

> Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac.

As stable as Chrome dev channel? I use Chrome dev channel (on Linux), but I'm still a bit hesitant about using the Firefox nightlies.

Actually most browsers' alphas are very stable these days. At home I run Opera Next, Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly and I haven't had any problems for months.

Sometimes some websites are not shown properly in one of those but all it takes is to switch to another browser.

Zero crashes, zero manual restarts, zero lag.

And addon support?

I run Aurora and use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter[1] to disable version checks and run any add-on I want. For most of my add-ons this works fine, but if there is a significant API change an add-on might not work correctly. But if you were scared of that you wouldn't be using Nightly or Aurora.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

re: 6 -- there were very few performance tweaks in FF6. Mostly CSS3 and HTML5 additions. FF7 is the 'performance' build (Azure, first round of start-up, smaller memory footprint). FF8 seems to have some performance bits -- and presumably it will have some feature additions, too (but I need to investigate).

The optimizations highlighted in the article are going in to Firefox 8. What would they talk about 6 and 7?

6 and 7 will include other improvements and features which can be discussed elsewhere. Mozilla will release a new major version every 6 weeks.

Wait, "will"? We are talking about Firefox 8 in the present tense (with "is"), and yet talking about 6 and 7 in the future (with "will")?!

Are you seriously going to over-analyze specific tenses of words? Each major version will include different features. Stop just trying to distract the conversation.

Apparently saurik and I are the only ones confused!

I found it very jarring to read that Firefox 6 isn't out yet, but the thread talks as if Firefox 8 is actually out, or very close to being released. In my mind I'm envisioning a weird, staggered, neither increasing nor decreasing of version number release cycle.

I think you're coming from a different angle where all of this is very familiar for you, so you can't relate to the confusion some of us other readers have had to deal with.

The "conversation" of this thread started with someone commenting on the fact, seemingly surprised and even bothered, that we are already talking about Firefox 8 when seemingly Firefox 6 and 7 went by so quickly we didn't notice it happening. In this context, it is incredibly relevant that Firefox 6 and 7 are still being described in the future tense, as that would imply that they haven't actually been released yet.

Versions 6 and 7 haven't been released yet, but the feature sets are locked in due to the faster major version release cycle. The recently discovered memory fragmentation issues (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058) and more efficient garbage collection are being addressed in version 8.

The bug you linked to will be fixed in version 7, not 8.

FF6 is in beta, should be out by the end of summer (or early autumn), FF7 is in alpha and should be released before end-of-year.

I guess FF8 (which just arrived on the nightly channel) will be up for release in late 2011-early 2012.

See this calendar for specific dates when new Firefox updates will be pushed to the Nightly, Aurora, Beta, and Release channels: https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar

(This should be very familiar to anyone who has seen Chrome's update schedule, which has three versions in flight at once, staggered by the same six-week intervals.)

They are employing 6 weeks for each version number, like Chrome, so they'll be out much sooner.

Specifically:

* August 16 - Firefox 6 * September 27 - Firefox 7 * November 8 - Firefox 8

Reminds me an awful lot of the jump from DirectX 3.0 to 5.0.

Others have pointed out that Mozilla is releasing 6.0 / 7.0 very soon, so my above comment is moot...

Or DOS 3.3 to DOS 5. (but that was because of a bug in DOS 4)

Doing a search for Firefox 6 on Google finds this article: "Firefox 6 (And 7!) Are Right Around The Corner -- Here's What's New"... almost makes it sound like they were released concurrently ;P.

http://www.businessinsider.com/firefox-6-2011-7