Mozilla’s UX-Nightly build of Firefox
15 March, 2012 § 39 Comments
Have you heard of our UX Nightly build of Firefox? Yes? No? Either answer is good, because even if you knew about it before, you should get reacquainted with it now.
Long story short, there was a bug that broke nightly updates for users of UX Nightly. So starting right now, as in, RIGHT NOW, download an updated UX Nightly build!
What is the UX branch?
Ironically, it is the branch of Firefox with potentially the worst user experience :D. The UX Nightly branch is the branch where developers can test out new features and experience them for a while before knowing if it’s something we want to ship. Currently, there are patches on the UX Nightly for removing redundant text in tab titles, parts of the new Australis theme, and enhancements for the New Tab page.
Any other reason to download?
Glad you asked. Yes, there is another reason to download. The first 10 people that download it now and send me a screenshot of their about:support page (hence, proving that they have updated) will get a nice postcard in the mail signed by as many members of the UX team that I can meet up with (at least three, I promise to try my best).
Please send your email to REDACTED and include a mailing address if you would like a postcard. If it’s too hard for me to send you the postcard (location/price/who-knows), then I’ll try to send you a scanned copy of the postcard I would have sent.
Contest update
Wow, that was fast. In less than an hour I received the first 10 entries. I’ll upload a scanned image here for others who would like to see the postcard 🙂
JAWS 
The UX icon still looks like the nightly icon, will it be updated to look like the same on your post image ?
Hopefully some time soon. We don’t have 16×16 icons for the new icons yet, so we’ll be waiting until those get made before we can update the product.
Um it seems to be identical to the Nightly version (on a mac at least), what’s up with that?
Different features come and go on the UX Nightly at different times, so you’ll want to keep updating and checking to see what’s new.
[…] mid-March I held a contest on my blog to get people to try out the UX-Nightly build of Firefox. The UX Nightly branch is the branch where developers can test out new features and […]
I really like UX Nightly, thanks!
The windows link is still broken
Thanks, I fixed it now 🙂
Mmm, I installed this version to test Australis, but it looks exactly like the version 22. Did I do something wrong?
You can go to Help->About to make sure that you are running the latest versions. There have been some delays in getting the most recent builds out to users within the past couple days. It should be fixed this week.
Is there any way to reveal that my build is indeed UX version? Im running 64bit linux but all branding is Nightly. As the previous poster pointed out, Im neither getting the new tabjoy experience I was so excited to see.
If you are running UX, the appname will be “UX” and all references to the app will be shown as “UX”. This means that you shouldn’t see the word “Nightly” or “Firefox” within the application. You should try downloading the UX build and installing it again.
That’s not true of the mac build at least, where the builds are Firefox, FirefoxNightly, FirefoxUX, etc.
Do the UX builds contain the same code as the regular Nightly ?
Yes, the UX Nightly contains the same code as Firefox Nightly, then with some extra changes added on top.
Excuse me if this is dumb, but Firefox-UX doesn’t seem to have a toolkit (in Linux), at least a recognizable one like GTK which is (if true) very fine in my otherwise GTK-free system.
Is that correct and future Firefoxes will be devoid of GTK as well? Can you explain a bit?
I’m not sure what you mean here, but there shouldn’t be any difference in GTK between Firefox-UX and Firefox-Nightly.
I notice UX Win64 has been missing from nightly since version 20a1 (after 2012-11-23).
Will it be back?
Yeah, I think so, maybe in a couple months though.