Nightly: Difference between revisions

[[File:Firefox-nightly logo-only RGB 25%.png|x150px|Nightly Logo]][[File:Firefox-nightly wordmark-only RGB 25%.png||x150px|Nightly Wordmark]]

Every day, Mozilla developers write code that is merged into a common code repository (mozilla-central) and every day that code is compiled so as to create a pre-release version of Firefox based on this code for testing purposes, this is what we call a Nightly build. Once this code matures, it is merged into stabilization repositories (Aurora and later Beta) where that code will be polished until we reach a level of quality that allows us to ship a new final version of Firefox to hundreds of millions of people. This development process used to ship a new version of Firefox every 5 to 8 weeks is called the Train Model.

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Of course, Nightly does not have the polish, quality and stability of the Release channel as this is a work in progress but we are doing our best through automation, QA and community to provide you the best nightly builds possible.

And if you want to go a step further, you can file bugs in our [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org Bug tracker] with detailed information about what is not working for you in Nightly.

'''➡ Go to [https://nightly.mozilla.org nightly.mozilla.org]'''

All of our available builds are listed on this page: https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/all/

Nightly gets an update every day (or every night actually), usually around 12:00PM UTC.

Sometimes, we will issue more than one update per day, typically this is because we found out we introduced a major regression (a spike in crashes for example) and we don't want our users to have a broken browser for 24h.

We maintain a few communication channels to give you news about the development of Nightly features or activities relevant to our community of Nightly users:

* Experimental platform features page on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Experimental_features

First of all, thank you for doing that! Bugs reported early are also more easy to fix or back out than bugs reported weeks or months after the code was written, simply because developers just wrote it and have all of it fresh in their memory.

One more thing, please add the ''nightly-community'' word in the ''keyword'' field of your bug report, that helps us triage better the bugs filed by our core community.

A regression is when something that used to work is no longer working or no longer working as expected.

If your bug is a regression, please add the ''regression'' keyword to your bug report.

Here is an article on the Nightly blog about it: [https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/10/11/found-a-regression-in-firefox-give-us-details-with-mozregression/ Found a regression in Firefox? Give us details with mozregression!]

''TODO''

This is a useful extension which adds many tools dedicated to bug filing and regression finding.

The [Github repository https://github.com/mozilla/nightlytt] has a short description of what it can do.

This is a great way to get involved, our developers have full documentation on how to get started hacking on Mozilla code on MDN:

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Introduction Contributing to the Mozilla code base]

Here is a video tutorial explaining how to install Firefox Nightly on Windows alongside an existing installation of Firefox:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvh3PxD_p50  Install Firefox Nightly cleanly on Windows]

''TODO''

We build and provide distribution-neutral binaries and these binaries can be installed and updated without any dependency to a package manager.

If you want to create a Launcher for your app, you will need to create a ''.desktop'' file, here is on our blog an article about it for Ubuntu and Unity: [Getting Firefox Nightly to stick to Ubuntu’s Unity Dock https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2016/09/19/getting-firefox-nightly-to-stick-to-ubuntus-unity-dock/]  

Mozilla does not provide packages (.deb/.rpm) for Linux, our tar.bz2 binaries work on all distributions which meet Firefox [system requirements https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/aurora/system-requirements/].

Mozilla does not maintain repositories for distributions, some volunteers maintain their own repository or ppa but usually those are not maintained over time for Nightly.  

The advised installation method is to use Mozilla-provided builds and its software updater.

We have plans to provide Snap binaries of Firefox and once this is ready, we will probably propose also them for Nightly. The tracking bug is [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1297513 Automate generation of Firefox snap packages].