You finally, really did it.

It’s not entirely unexpected for me, but it’s the kind of news one hopes to never find in his front door, like a car-bomb if you will. If this goes ahead I can imagine that less and less time and human and economic resources will be spent on the Mozilla Firefox proper for the PC, once B2G catches the OEMs’ attention.

I guess it’s time for me to accept (again) that Firefox has ultimately become the open-source Internet Explorer.

And here it is, at last. Just like the last time, the new version migrates from Aurora to Beta on Tuesday but it isn’t offered via the update channels until the next Friday, while the newer ex-Nightly is published in Aurora in the meantime.

I still think this is unnecessarily awkward for users who are interested in one specific Firefox version, or who want to avoid disabling incompatible add-ons as much as possible.

… Where’s Firefox 6 beta?

Supposedly, Firefox 6 entered the beta channel on July 5, yet there’s no signs of it in the Mozilla FTP server or in the website proper.

With Firefox 7 entering Aurora now, I’m in a slightly uncomfortable position because I hoped to continue tracking version 6 once it moved to beta — now I’m using an old version 6 snapshot from Aurora hoping that the beta will be packaged and announced soon.

It seems somewhat inconsistent from my standpoint to let Aurora be replaced by a newer version before the previous Aurora is properly promoted to Beta.

Interestingly, the same situation appears to have occurred with the announcement of Firefox 5 beta in May, the difference being that I didn’t particularly mind because it was in preparation for the first official release after Firefox 4 and the decision to switch to a rapid release schedule, so a little schedule slip was to be expected for an initial deployment.