Firefox Minefield is a daily build that has the latest bug-fixes, enhancements and test options that are not yet available on the stable release or might never end up being on future Firefox stable releases. In simple words, Firefox Minefield is a playing field for developers to continuously, often daily, update with the new things they are working with; which makes minefield nightly builds often unstable.

From a user’s point of view this is a great way to try out new options/features without having to wait few months for the next release. When Mozilla introduced major enhancements to its tracemonkey javascript engine last year, it was available on minefield nightlies, months before stable Firefox release.

However, manually updating nightly builds everyday can be a hassle. You can use this script (thanks to jalada) to run a daily cron and update to the latest build.

–> Make sure you already have Firefox Minefield installed in /opt/firefox

–> The script is for 64-bit builds. For x86 platforms you can get the correct links from here.

–> If this breaks your Firefox, I am not responsible. Hopefully you know your stuff :)

#!/bin/sh
cd /opt/;
rm firefox-3.6a1pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
wget "http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/firefox-3.6a1pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2";
rm -rf firefox/;
tar -jxvf firefox-3.6a1pre.en-US.linux-x86_64.tar.bz2;
chmod -R a+r firefox;
rm /usr/bin/firefox;
ln -s /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox;

(line breaks are replaced with semi-colon)

Eventually you will have to edit the script when version number changes. Bonus points for anyone who can show a better way to auto-update to latest builds.

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