Is it safe to use Firefox Nightly?

[max22]

Basically as your main browser ? Does anyone do this ?

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

I did it for years without problems.

[max22]

Is it better than stable Firefox ?

[Max Norris]

I use it myself, Chrome's been my main for a while now but I still keep Firefox around.  Runs reasonably well, couple things to keep in mind though.  The E10S system is very far from reliable yet due to a lot of addons not working with it.  Speaking of addons, you'll occasionally run into incompatibility issues. It is prone to occasional glitches as you are using the nightly build, that's just the nature of a nightly. All in all though it's pretty reliable.  If you want newer but less potential issues, beta's also a good choice. 

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

9 minutes ago, max22 said:

Is it better than stable Firefox ?

It will be, in it's present state I would say no. I is probably more secure but you will find that many extensions will not work with it.

[satysin]

Safe? Yes. Rock stable? No. 

 

You might encounter issues that are being worked on or still unknown at the time. Other than that it is perfectly safe to use. Just don't complain about issues if you are not going to raise a bug report about

[+Gary7 Subscriber²]

Must be an echo in here.

[Obi-Wan Kenobi]

must be an echo in here.......must be an echo in here......must be an echo in here.....

[Andre S. Veteran]

1 hour ago, max22 said:

Is it better than stable Firefox ?

It seems you might not understand what a nightly build is. It is a build of the next version of the software, currently being developed. Any improvements it contains will end up in the stable release sooner or later. It may also contain regressions (i.e. new bugs); nightly builds do not undergo extensive testing and are more likely to contain important bugs than stable releases are. Some of these bugs may very well be security bugs. Furthermore, the build may use different compilation options (you could check; I don't know how Firefox does its nightlies) which could adversely affect performance, e.g. more extensive logging, debugging help, etc. It is a build designed for testing, not production or consumer usage.

 

By using a relatively untested version of the software, you expose yourself to issues users of the stable version don't, so of course it is not as safe as using a stable release. As the page clearly states: "These builds are for testing purposes only". Unless you need to use some specific new feature right now and cannot wait for it to make it into the stable release, it's probably not worth your time.