6 is in beta now. Nightlies were 7.0a a few days ago, but if you update.... yep, 8.0a1
PS. Nightly has been incredibly stable on my Mac. I actually use it in production, for no other reason than I was testing it and have no reason to get an old release since it's never crashed and is incredibly fast.
Actually most browsers' alphas are very stable these days. At home I run Opera Next, Chrome Canary and Firefox Nightly and I haven't had any problems for months.
Sometimes some websites are not shown properly in one of those but all it takes is to switch to another browser.
I run Aurora and use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter[1] to disable version checks and run any add-on I want. For most of my add-ons this works fine, but if there is a significant API change an add-on might not work correctly. But if you were scared of that you wouldn't be using Nightly or Aurora.
re: 6 -- there were very few performance tweaks in FF6. Mostly CSS3 and HTML5 additions. FF7 is the 'performance' build (Azure, first round of start-up, smaller memory footprint). FF8 seems to have some performance bits -- and presumably it will have some feature additions, too (but I need to investigate).
Are you seriously going to over-analyze specific tenses of words? Each major version will include different features. Stop just trying to distract the conversation.
Apparently saurik and I are the only ones confused!
I found it very jarring to read that Firefox 6 isn't out yet, but the thread talks as if Firefox 8 is actually out, or very close to being released. In my mind I'm envisioning a weird, staggered, neither increasing nor decreasing of version number release cycle.
I think you're coming from a different angle where all of this is very familiar for you, so you can't relate to the confusion some of us other readers have had to deal with.
The "conversation" of this thread started with someone commenting on the fact, seemingly surprised and even bothered, that we are already talking about Firefox 8 when seemingly Firefox 6 and 7 went by so quickly we didn't notice it happening. In this context, it is incredibly relevant that Firefox 6 and 7 are still being described in the future tense, as that would imply that they haven't actually been released yet.
Versions 6 and 7 haven't been released yet, but the feature sets are locked in due to the faster major version release cycle. The recently discovered memory fragmentation issues (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=666058) and more efficient garbage collection are being addressed in version 8.
(This should be very familiar to anyone who has seen Chrome's update schedule, which has three versions in flight at once, staggered by the same six-week intervals.)
Doing a search for Firefox 6 on Google finds this article: "Firefox 6 (And 7!) Are Right Around The Corner -- Here's What's New"... almost makes it sound like they were released concurrently ;P.
