Nightly
What is Firefox Nightly?
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 be merged into stabilization repositories (Aurora and later Beta) where that 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.
| 55 | 54 | 53 | 52 | 51 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nightly | Aurora | Beta | Release | ||
| Nightly | Aurora | Beta | Release |
Should I become a Nightly user?
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.
If you are a power-user, that you want to have access to features in developments months before they become mainstream, have tolerance for occasional functional regressions and are looking for an easy way to help Mozilla and Firefox development, you should use Nightly (ideally as your main browser but you can also use it alongside Firefox on the release channel or another browser).
Unlike Firefox on the Release channel, Nightly sends by default anonymized usage statistics, called Telemetry which helps us improve Firefox and track regressions on a daily basis. Just using Nightly and sending telemetry data is already of great help to all Mozilla developers as it allows them to get usage statistics on the features they work on.
Of course, Nightly may be more likely to crash than a final release and sending your crashes to our engineers is also of considerable help as it helps us catch instabilities and identify issues long before end-users are exposed to them.
And if you want to go a step further, you can file bugs in our Bug tracker with detailed information about what is not working for you in Nightly.
Where can I download Firefox Nightly?
➡ Go to nightly.mozilla.org
Nightly is available for all the platforms we support officially (Windows 7 and later, MacOS, Linux) and we provide both 32 and 64 bits for Linux and Windows. We also support a large range of languages ranging from Albanian to Vietnamese.
All of our available builds are listed on this page: https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/all/
Where can I get news about Nightly?
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:
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/FirefoxNightly
- Blog: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org
- IRC channel: #nightly on irc.mozilla.org
- Experimental platform features page on MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Experimental_features
Filing Bugs
I found a bug, how do I report it?
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.
If you think you have found a bug in Nightly, the best thing to do is indeed to report it in our Bug tracking system, called Bugzilla.
Bugzilla can be a bit intimidating when you use it for the first time, but we have documentation to help you make useful bug reports here that may get you started: Bugzilla: Bug writing guidelines
Don't hesitate to ask experienced Nightly users (staff or employees) to help you file the bug in the #nightly IRC channel if you are unsure about the process or if English is not your native language and want to make sure your bug description is understandable.
Once you have filed the bug, you may get questions from bug triagers (people that enrich existing bug reports with useful metadata and try to get the right dev in front of the right issue) or developers that are trying to reproduce your bug using your configuration or the steps to reproduce what you experienced - watch your mailbox for such messages!
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.
The bug I found is a regression!
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.
We have a specific tool helping us to find when the code that introduced a regression landed in Nightly, this is called mozegression. There is a GUI for Windows and a command line interface for Linux/Mac. Here is an article on the Nightly blog about it: Found a regression in Firefox? Give us details with mozregression!
I want to report a crash
TODO