If you are any kind of a techie you run some pre-release software.
Since joining Mozilla I’ve been amazed at how much work gets done by such a small group of people.
One of the ways this happens is that the Open Source community helps and not just by writing code. Testing new features and filing bugs is vastly important too.
Plus, you get to use the latest and greatest features.
As a truely Open Source project, the daily build (actually the NIGHTLY builds) of Firefox are available each day.
You can download the Nightly Firefox Builds HERE
The Mac and Windows builds give you installers but, as Linux wizzards know, Linux works a bit differently.
The easier way to do it is to open a Terminal window and use the following three separate commands.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install firefox-trunk
Then you can use the automatically installed launcher to run Firefox Nightly.
Tada !
When you find problems, it is always a good idea to report any bugs you find in on https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
Just before the Firefox 4 release I reported some bugs and Mozilla even sent me a free tshirt.
Not sure how many t-shirts they sent out, but it was a nice gesture.
If you are an expert and report security bugs to browser vendors you can get thousands of dollars.
I should add something:
When you start running daily builds, it is smart to make a backup of your Firefox profile. Just in case something goes wrong.
Better yet, make a separate profile for each version of Firefox: Stable, Beta, Aurora and Nightly. I have these aliases in my .bashrc (skipping the beta)
alias ffaurora="/opt/aurora/firefox -no-remote -P aurora 2>/dev/null &"
alias nightly="/opt/nightly/firefox -no-remote -P nightly 2>/dev/null &"
alias ffox="firefox -no-remote -P default 2>/dev/null &"
AGREED !Thanks Guys !
How have you got the Nightly icon into your panel? As far as I know, Mozilla doesn’t provide desktop shortcuts on Linux currently.
Also, I’d suggest installing Firefox binaries into your home folder. It is not the best practice to install binaries on the home folder under Linux (and it is more likely that Windows users will do it), but it allows you to make use of the Firefox update service which will update your build once a day to the newest version automatically.
Why not from the PPA?
Hi Tomer, Sorry, somethig happened with my post and part of it got deleted. I fixed it. Please see the three steps in the updated post. Following them with get you the launcher.