Originally posted by muzikool
I understand the reason for the nightlies, but I also understand that some are less stable than others, while some are even less stable than the latest public release. I would like to see what improvements have been made on the way to 0.7, but if there is nothing too significant, then I will just stick with what I've got. Basically, it would be cool to use a newer build if it's as stable as the public release... I just want to make sure and get the right build.
Well, technically, it is true that nightlies contain more bugs as compared to the latest milestone builds. However, the more important thing to check is whether these bugs are major ones or minor ones that you don't usually notice.
For example, as I mentioned earlier, I've been downloading a new build every night for quite a while now, and rarely have I ended up with an unusable build.
Most of the times, the bugs are so minor, that they're not even noticeable during normal day-to-day browsing, and are spotted by people while running specific tests, or visiting specific sites.
On other occasions, you might see a significant bug or two that still allow you to use the browser, but are quite inconvenient. Those are the builds that I avoid, and revert back to the last relatively-stable nightly that I was using.
And then there are those rare occassions when the build is completely in crumbles, causing more problems than you can handle. Some builds end up on the FTP server although they can't even be unzipped. But again, these builds don't come by too often.
So what am I using currently?
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20030929 Firebird/0.7+
It seems to be working fine for me, although I do know that it causes problems rendering pages with ads if you use the HOSTS file method to block them. Another relatively major bug in this build is that it crashes Java on Linux, but that doesn't affect Windows builds. All-in-all, a very usable build, in my opinion.
If you like, you can download this official nightly here:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/nightly/2003-09-29-08-trunk/MozillaFirebird-win32.zip
Hope that looooong post was of some use