Aurora lets you try Firefox 5 now

Play with new stuff early

18 April 2011 12:16 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Fans of Firefox are being given the chance to try the next version of the browser - Firefox 5 - and all the new features it brings, albeit in an environment that probably isn’t going to be that stable.

Mozilla, the organisation behind the free web browser, has launched Aurora – a browser that lets you experience the newest innovations from the group, as long as you don’t mind plenty of crashes.

Not a finished product by any stretch of the imagination, Aurora comes before the official Firefox beta and the final release, which is deemed to be as stable as it can get.

Its builds are created out of the mozilla-aurora repository, which is synced from mozilla-central every 6 weeks. That means that it’s not as buggy as the even earlier stage, which gets nightly updates (called, suitably, Minefield, by the way), but is a good preview for those keen to “have a go”.

To be honest, Aurora is mainly for developers to see how their add-ons and extensions will work, but hey, we just love the fact that we can get in on the sneak peek action too. Who wants to wait for anything these days?

Just don’t blame us if you lose anything important when the browser crashes out on you.

- Firefox 4 review

If you download it, let us know how you get on in the comments below.