Introducing Aurora 9 | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Aurora 9

hacks.mozilla.org

44 pointsmaratd11 comments

I was wondering what Aurora is - apparently a release in between a nightly and a beta: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/04/aurora/

They really need to call it alpha - or something else so that the users will not need to do a search to figure out what it means.

I'm sure this comes up in every discussion about Aurora, but it's also a confusing name because of the pretty much homophonically named Arora browser.

Not really. I don't think most people have ever heard of Arora. I've been tracking browsers pretty closely for a dozen years or so and I've never once run across someone talking about Arora. I did look it up after reading your comment here and it appears to be a mostly still-born effort.

"Aurora" is an homage to an old Netscape codename from the late 1990s:

http://www2.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&S...

There was a discussion about this here on HN when they announced this naming change. At the time it didn't make sense to me and it really still doesn't. The Nightly, Alpha, Beta, RC standard is pretty ubiquitous and I think it's just confusing to swap out one of the terms with a new one. I knew about the name convetion change and I still saw this title and was perplexed for a moment.

Edit: found the old article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443719

Pretty standard... except Chrome calls their alpha releases Canary.

For some info about new user-facing features in the latest Aurora, see the Future Releases blog post:

http://blog.mozilla.com/futurereleases/2011/09/30/firefoxaur...

Aurora 9 introduces the CSS 'font-stretch' property, first suggested back in 1999(!): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3512 - Notably, only IE has implemented it so far.

Finally Mozilla will be a modern browswer.

The world would be better with this left unimplemented.

I don't use it, but I'm glad that there's a competitive marketplace in browsers again. Here's hoping some of the better ideas are shameless stolen by Webkit and the Safari team.

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