Firefox 9 “First Taste” Available for Download

Early adopters looking to get the first taste of Firefox 9 can now do just that, provided that they’re ready to download and test a very early development milestone of the open source browser. 

Mozilla has started serving a Nightly release of Firefox 9, an equivalent of a pre-alpha Build, if you will. 

Having launched Firefox 6 Final officially earlier this week, the open source browser vendor moved onward to developing not just the next version of Firefox, but the additional two following that. 

Essentially, Mozilla is now working on Firefox 7, Firefox 8 and Firefox 9 concomitantly, although the focus is placed on the next immediate version. 

Firefox 7 is on the brink of graduating to the Beta Channel. It’s just a matter of days before Mozilla will announce the official Firefox 7 Beta. At the same time, Firefox 8 will move into Aurora, and replace Firefox 7. 

Mozilla has already migrated Firefox 8 Central to Aurora and Firefox 7 Aurora to Beta, but it has yet to officially announce the new releases. 

Speaking of which, Firefox 8 Aurora seems to have already been wrapped up, and is up for grabs via the company’s FTP servers. 

Mozilla’s FTP servers are also the place to go for Firefox 9 Nightly. This is, as the label implies, a nightly Build of the browser, designed only for early adopters to run in testing environments. Firefox 9 Nightly should not be deployed into production. 

It’s important to note that Firefox 9 will continue to evolve throughout the remainder of 2011. The plan is to have it move to Aurora in September, and to get Firefox 9 beta out the door in November. Provided that everything will go well, Firefox 9 Final will be the last version of the open source browser released in 2011, in December, ahead of Christmas. 

Obviously, Firefox 9 is not showing its full potential or set of features and capabilities just yet, but then again it’s just at the start of its road.

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