Because software defaults matter, we have just changed the default bookmarks for the Nightly channel to be more useful to power-users deeply interested in day to day progress of Firefox and potentially willing to help Mozilla improve their browser through bug and crash reports, shared telemetry data and technical feedback.

Users on the Nightly channels had the same bookmarks than users on the release channel, these bookmarks target end-users with limited technical knowledge and link to Mozilla sites providing end-user support, add-ons or propose a tour of Firefox features. Not very compelling for a tech-savvy audience that installed pre-alpha software!

As of last week, new Nightly users or existing Nightly users creating a new profile have a different set of bookmarks that are more likely to meet their interest in the technical side of Mozilla and contributing to Firefox as an alpha tester. Here is what the default bookmarks are:

There are links to this blog of course, to Planet Mozilla, to the Mozilla Developer Network, to the Nightly Testers Tools add-on, to about:crashes and to the IRC #nightly channel in case you find a bug and would like to talk to other Nightly users about it and of course a link to Bugzilla. The Firefox tour link was also replaced by a link to the contribute page on mozilla.org.

It’s a minor change to the profile data as we don’t want to make of Nightly a different product from Firefox, but I hope another small step in the direction of empowering our more technical user base to help Mozilla build the most stable and reliable browser for hundreds of millions of people!