I've been using the beta channel since FF6 (maybe) and, as you said, it's been quite reliable. It's fun because you feel like you're somehow an insider and privileged because you get features (that no one but you would care about!) earlier than everyone else. Yes, these are quite silly feelings, but what the heck.
Sounds like you might enjoy the Nightly channel, in my experience it's been pretty stable.
Aurora is a good compromise. I was on nightly for a few months, and I had one or two times where something would break. Usually it was just a GUI element getting misaligned from some change. The worst was when it broke web video for a day.
I wish there was a reliable Aurora channel on Arch. The pkgbuild system isn't well suited to keeping up to date with a moving filename target like Firefox.
I've used Aurora for some time, extensions often get borked or don't work, so I went back to Beta.
btw one tip for people who switch to beta/aurora - disable extensions compatibility check.
There's an Arch developer named heftig who maintains a custom repository with Aurora. I've been using it successfully the last few months. I think aurora is updated daily, but I haven't watched it closely.
Info: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=117157 Repo 32-bit: http://pkgbuild.com/~heftig/repo/i686 Repo 64-bit: http://pkgbuild.com/~heftig/repo/x86_64
Another option is to download the latest build [1] and use the built-in updater.
[1] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/tinderbox-bu...
I've switched to Aurora for the past month and it's noticeably faster than FF18b on my older hardware.
I agree, nightly does break badly from time to time. Beta or aurora are better bets.
They do this every time: Make a news event around the appearance of a new Firefox release on the FTP site before it is officially announced/released.
Although this stunt seems considerably stupider now that everyone running a recent version of Firefox will automatically get updates...
I'm on the stable release, and I just got the v18 release by going to Help --> About and installed the automatic update. Their release notes also indicate that version 18 is now released as well: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/18.0/releasenotes/
If anyone decides to change the release channel, you can do it now by modifying 'app.update.channel' in about:config to nightly, aurora, beta...
If you're the type who would be willing to install this, you should consider using the Beta channel instead. Beta releases are generally very close to release quality, and you'd help gather telemetry data earlier.