For a long while now, if you are an early adopter of technology, Google Chrome was the place to be. You could always download the current release version, but if you wanted to live on the edge a little bit, you could install the beta version.
The beta version offered features deemed not quite ready for the stable release version, so could likely crash more often, and was not recommended for production environments. If you were even more gutsy, you could install the development version, which in effect was two releases away. So, if the stable version was Chrome 9, the Beta version would be Chrome 10 and the Development version Chrome 11.
Firefox users wanting a rougher, new-features-the-second-they-arrive version, haven’t been so lucky. You could always downoad Minefield, the in-progress beta version, but there wasn’t anything official.
Until now. Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox (and the Thunderbird email/news client), recently unveiled its three-prong development model, which mirrors Chrome, quite closely, although it does use slightly different terminology. The stable version will always be just that, Stable. Currently Firefox is sitting at version 4.0.1, and if you download it from mozilla.org, that’s what you’ll get. If you want the newer versions, however, read on.
Point your web browser of choice to
this address, to see the in-progress versions of Firefox.