Firefox Nightly, version 16, is the pre-alpha version of Firefox. It is currently slated to be released around the beginning of October 2012. It is in pre-alpha stage, which mean only the very basic changes have been released and worked on. As versions 14 – Beta – and then version 15 – Aurora – are released, the work on Nightly will increase to make it a working version with powerful changes for Firefox by its release date. Nightly is available for the public to take a look at and our brief guide will give you a glimpse of the future of Firefox.
What is Firefox Nightly?
Since Nightly is still in pre-alpha, you may run into problems and issues you would not while normally using Firefox. If this is the case, take a deep breath, make sure to document the issues and submit them to Mozilla. This will help make Nightly better for everyone, not just you. This is the whole point of beta testing software.
After installing Nightly, we found very few differences between what we currently use with Firefox and its release so far.
When you open Nightly for the first time, you will be greeted by a brief introduction from the developers.
Watch the video and learn more about Nightly, for now you will not notice many differences.
The biggest difference we noticed when you first load Nightly and go to your speed dial tab, you will see the navigation bar at the bottom allowing you to access some of the most common areas in Firefox.
Some of the background changes so far released in Nightly include panel-based download manager support, opt-in activation for all plugins, OS X 10.7+ support and speedy session restore features. The nightly version is to move to Beta on August 27th, 2012. Till then we can expect a lot of improvement and better features.
Some of the development tools include improvements to how the developer toolbar works as well as how command line prompts function.
For the overall platform of Firefox, changes have been made to update and evolve utilizing PDFs inline as opposed to opening them separately within the browser. This function will hopefully work similar to how Chrome displays PDFs inline however some work still must be done to make this feature work smoother for users.
Keep in mind that version 16.0 of Firefox is still in development stages and may not be suitable for all users. If you are looking for a stable release, going with version 13.0 is your best bet for now. However, if you are looking for a way to make Firefox even better, testing out and reporting issues with Nightly may just be the way to do that.
How can you make Firefox 16.0 better?
While most Firefox users would never get any benefit from using a pre-alpha version of the browser, by testing out its feature before it goes public you actually help not only yourself but every other Firefox user. By reporting bugs, issues and other anomalies while using Firefox in a beta stage, you can actually help make it better, more stable and help evolve it in ways even the developers never thought possible. Firefox allows you to make reports, e-mail in results and give the types of examples of issues they may not be able to create themselves.
Test Nightly.
