The Burning Edge
One of the most useful resources I use for keeping track of Firefox development is The Burning Edge it features regular updates on developments in Firefox nightly builds. For those that don’t follow Firefox development closely they may not know that Mozilla release nightly development builds that incorporate the changes of the day. These builds are not intended for general use, but for those who want to help with Firefox development or testing.
The Burning Edge is useful both to users of these nightly builds so they can see what has changed in a particular release (so they know any known bugs and regressions in that build and to know what new features to test) and also to people who just want to track the progress of future Firefox releases in a very detailed way.
Sites like this show one of the strengths of open source, you can follow a project as closely or as little as you want. It’s quite possible to follow a project in a much detail as knowing the daily changes or you can just download the releases when they come out. With commercial software you’re limited to the information that the company producing the software wants to share or information that’s leaked.
The Burning Edge uses publically available information of recent fixes and regressions. Bonsai displays all check-ins to the Mozilla code base as they are made, bonsaibugs.org makes this slighly more readable by cross referencing the bugs from the checking with the Bugzilla descriptions.
For example, the latest Burning Edge post shows a few minor fixes related to RSS feed display, drag and drop and a few display issues. It’s a relatively quiet start to the new year. A more example of a detailled Burning Edge post is when dbarons reflow branch was landed, this was a major change that changed many aspects of the browsers rendering and made Firefox pass the Acid2 test.
There’s a similar site dedicated to Mozilla Thunderbird, the email client, called The Rumbling Edge. As for users of the Mac browser Camino, there’s Camino Update.