Firefox Developer Edition replaces the Aurora channel in the Firefox Release Process. Like Aurora, features will land in the Developer Edition every six weeks, after they have stabilized in Nightly builds.
By using the Developer Edition, you gain access to tools and platform features at least 12 weeks before they reach the main Firefox release channel.
They really need to release a ‘non-developer’ edition to end users, that has all the dev stuff stripped out. I’m sure 99% of end users don’t need all that stuff in the main build.
Beta channel?
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#beta
I’ve seen this mentioned in a few places.
But can I ask: why would you want that ?
There is no overhead for including it other than download size.
Edited 2014-11-10 22:25 UTC
It might also slow things down (indeed, it almost certainly does, if it bloats the binary), and it might give more helpful crash-reports.
It does not bloat the binary, pretty much all developer toolbars in the current browsers are actually build in HTML5/JS. So the binary is the same size.
Only when you enable the developer tool will it be loaded from disk.
A reply to myself with the proof:
https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/file/c0d559389a5c/toolkit/dev…
Lennie,
Not to make a big fuss over it, but it’s likely that the binary itself needed more code to support all the JS based developer enhancements. Removing the JS portion is fine, but the binary will still contain all the support structures & glue to run that JS. The unused code paths within the binary could arguably be called “bloat” for normal users. Removing support for dev features from the binary would require conditional compilation, though I’m not sure it’d make that much of a difference. I also think Mozilla’s philosophy promotes end users using the same version as developers.
Edited 2014-11-11 17:09 UTC
99% or more of what the JS code for the developers uses is just using the normal HTML/JS-APIs.
The biggest difference is some extra permissions, but as Firefox is still build with XUL at the moment that permissions system is in place anyway.
And for example Chrome also has a similar permissions system in place, because Chrome also supports extensions.
Maybe remote debugging is a ‘special’ API/protocols, but every browser has that. Even, maybe especially, on mobile like Safari on iOS.
It looks like Firefox developer tools now with an extension supports a large number of other remote debugging protocols. And more and more developer tools are starting to support multiple remote debugging protocols.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if soon the browser developers will standardize on their remote debugging protocols.
Edited 2014-11-11 21:45 UTC
@Wootery @Alfman if you guys care about Firefox or want it to success in the market place.
Maybe because you like Firefox, have a lot of addons you like or because you think Mozilla’s missions of the Open Web is important or because you think competition in the browser space is important…
To help improve Firefox I suggest helping to test E10: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis
Test your addons and see if they work in the multi-process mode of Firefox and report anything that isn’t working: http://arewee10syet.com/
Why E10 ? E10 is the last big task list for Firefox to make it a lean mean fighting browser machine. 😉
Edited 2014-11-11 22:37 UTC
Are you 100% positive about this?
Like 99.95% 🙂
So if I am on Nightly channel I don’t need to do anything?
Actually, developer edition is just Firefox Aurora (Alpha)