A Firefox Nightly blog!

Breaking News!

It is with great pleasure that we are launching this new blog dedicated to Firefox Nightly, Nightly users and getting involved in Firefox and Mozilla contribution through Nightly.

Firefox Nightly is the earliest development stage of Firefox, rebuilt every night from the latest code produced by Mozilla. It is literally a glimpse of what the Future of Firefox will be.

Of course, this is  not software meant to be used by the general public, its user base consists of developers, testers and power users that love to live on the bleeding edge of technology. They accept that some features may be unfinished, that the product has bugs or occasionally suffers from regressions that would not happen with a regular version of Firefox.

Today, tens of thousands of people use Nightly either as their main browser or as their secondary browser. That’s a lot but, ideally, we would be a lot more people using Nightly, reporting our bugs and crashes and generally speaking providing a healthy feedback loop to developers. The better the quality on Nightly, the greatest will be Firefox for the hundreds of millions of people that use Firefox to access and control their online life.

We intend this blog to be a stable point of information about what happens on Nightly, what features or core technologies landed, how Nightly users can help Mozilla fix bugs and regressions and more generally how a tech-savvy person can move from being a consumer of Firefox to a contributor of Firefox.

The initial team of writers for this blog is comprised of Marcia Knous and Pascal Chevrel from the Release Management team, and Jean-Yves Perrier from the MDN team. Three Mozilla old-timers and community builders. But this blog is also open to guest writers: Developers landing a feature and that may want to present it, Quality Assurance testers willing to explain how to report a bug or find a regression range, community members that want to relate their experience promoting Nightly in their region… You are all welcome here and  can contact me (pascal AT mozilla DOT com) if you want to write content  or help promote Nightly to the  technical crowd.

Are you a power user and not a Firefox Nightly user yet?  Then visit our download page and download it for your platform. This page only lists English (en-US) builds for desktop, we actually have the same builds available in many languages on our FTP site  and yes, reporting typos or mistranslations in Nightly is also useful for our quality!

Bookmark this site, follow its RSS feed, follow us on Twitter because there is more to come soon!

Pascal Chevrel for the Nightly Boosters team

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22 comments on “A Firefox Nightly blog!”

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  1. rctgamer3 wrote on

    Does this new blog replace the old Firefox Nightly Tumblr blog @ firefoxnightly.tumblr.com ? If so, might want to post an update there that that tumblr blog is no longer maintained, with a link to this blog.

    Reply

    1. Pascal Chevrel wrote on

      Yes it replaces it, the tumblr blog was not maintained and was not focused on content and interaction with the community, it also was not an official site on a mozilla.org domain which made it a bit more difficult to share or link directly in Firefox Nightly UI and in-product pages (like default bookmarks or promotional snippets on about:home for example).

      Reply

  2. Karl Dubost wrote on

    Very good idea. It might be good to also cover the features tested in developer tools.
    And to explain why a feature didn’t make the cut (either delayed, removed definitely, etc.) Good opportunity for talking about technical issues and associated challenges when tested live.

    Thanks.

    Reply

  3. Pavlo wrote on

    I switched to Nightly from Firefox when it was in its’ 30s due to a instability of Firefox, which was notoriously ‘fragile’ 🙂 Yes, this ‘unstable release for testers’ proved to be much more stable then the upstream app 🙂

    Since then FF grown to a robust application and it serves best my family on a shared desktop, but on my workhorse-laptop I prefer Nightly and its perfectly stable for me – a front-end developer.

    Reply

  4. mangeurdenuage wrote on

    Do you have any tutorial to help on regression ?

    Reply

    1. Pascal Chevrel wrote on

      We are working on a simple one for the blog, but you should find a lot of information about finding regression ranges with mozregression there: http://mozilla.github.io/mozregression/

      Reply

      1. mangeurdenuage wrote on

        thank you
        I’ll look at it
        have a nice day 🙂

        Reply

  5. mangeurdenuage wrote on

    Hello, problems to signal
    The latest update of nightly is very strange.
    Text is disappearing reappearing else where.
    What is strange is that when you select another window than nightly everything goes back to place, until you begin to move your cursor on it.

    Please contact me if you need data or more.

    Reply

    1. Pascal Chevrel wrote on

      If you are on Linux, it may be this bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285243
      A temporary workaround is to set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true

      Reply

      1. mangeurdenuage wrote on

        sorry I said crap
        setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true
        works only after restarting nightly
        My bad.
        thanks again for the help

        Reply

  6. mangeurdenuage wrote on

    yes I use the Distribution GNU Trisquel 7 (aka ubuntu 14.04)
    Thank for the help but I didn’t work.

    Reply

  7. mangeurdenuage wrote on

    ok so new thing
    when
    layers.acceleration.force-enabled
    is false, when you open and close the “Show Update History” it does not make nightly crash
    But when
    layers.acceleration.force-enabled
    is true, and you open and close the “Show Update History”
    it crash

    Reply

    1. Pascal Chevrel wrote on

      The faulty patch in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285243 was backed out and new builds are being created now. Can you wait for these updated nightlies and see if you can still reproduce the crash? If you can, we are definitely interested in a bug report!!

      Reply

      1. mangeurdenuage wrote on

        I was just reading it.
        no problemo I’ll wait 😉 and test it.
        And help by making reports if needed.

        Reply

  8. anon wrote on

    This is great. Not to be picky but I also wish there was a separate blog for the mobile platform. In some ways they’re similar browsers but in many ways they’re very different. I’d just like to see more attention to mobile because most mobile browsers don’t respect privacy and they’re also juicier targets for tracking. Also, more and more of our searches are performed on mobile platforms now. Maybe not for Firefox since it’s hard to compete with default phone browsers but that’s the nature of things. Regardless, the mobile platform could get a lot more attention as a separate blog.

    Reply

  9. Bill Gianopoulos wrote on

    It used to be that when new features were to be tested, they would be added with a preference that was disabled by default, and a post would be made to the nightly build forum asking people to enable the preference and test and if they run into issue turn off the preference to see if the preference on caused the issue and if so file a bug. This involved the nightly testers in the testing process. Recently content sandboxing was turned on under Linux with notice and the Nightly testers are just uninformed guinea pigs and they are analyzing crash data to find issues. This is not the way I would like to see us operate. This is way to disenfranchise your nightly testers. Just my $0.02.

    Reply

    1. anon wrote on

      I also wish about:config had a description column. Chrome and Opera have descriptions on their chrome://flag settings page. For us Firefox users Firefox phone prefs are jumbled in with desktop prefs. Ones are already deprecated yet still remain… I have no idea what most do. From the FFox subreddit the opinion I’ve received from developers is “they’re not supposed to be for users to use.” Apparently that also means we’re not supposed to know what they do either? The wiki page for descriptions on prefs is perpetually outdated. It only makes sense to have descriptions right in the application, categorize them if they’re mobile-only, experimental/nightly only, etc. In the least the framework could be put in place and developers could choose to add descriptions over time.

      Reply

      1. Vangelis wrote on

        @anon: Needs to be updated ASAP, but you might
        want to have a look at the following addon:

        https://addons.mozilla.org/el/firefox/addon/config-descriptions/

        Best regards

        Reply

  10. Wellington Torrejais da Silva wrote on

    Nice idea!
    I waiting for news…

    Reply

  11. tapper wrote on

    Hi i have bin wanting a place to see what’s new in ff for a wile now grate news thanks

    Reply

  12. Ernest Durelle wrote on

    I normally do not get excited about software, any software. 64bit Nightly browser though, is AN experience.

    Reply

  13. *klop*cz wrote on

    Finally 🙂
    Hopefully we’ll get great replacement of http://firefoxnightly.tumblr.com/
    Please keep us updated with new features added to Nightly. I’m looking forward to read new articles about Nightly news. Good luck with https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/

    Reply

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