Mozilla's new Australis interface is moving along in the Firefox development process and is on track for widespread release in either Firefox 29 or 30.

"Firefox engineering management met today to make a decision on if Australis should uplift to Aurora on the 29 train, or wait one more cycle to ride the 30 train. On the balance of the arguments, the decision was made to uplift," Mozilla Senior Engineering Manager Justin Dolske wrote last week.

Aurora is what Mozilla calls the pre-beta version of future Firefox releases. The Aurora version of Firefox 29 will turn to beta in mid-march and then become a final release on April 29. Firefox 30 is scheduled for a final release on June 10. Australis could end up in either one of those.

After last week's decision, "Australis will be on both the Nightly channel (aka Firefox 30) and the Aurora channel (aka Firefox 29)," Dolske wrote. "Significant development will continue over the next 6 weeks, as we burn down current Australis bugs as well as new issues found by the Aurora audience. These fixes will land on both Nightly and Aurora. Upon the following uplift (March 17th), we'll again make an evaluation on uplifting Australis to Beta or holding it back on Aurora for the Firefox 30 train. There is significant risk to backing out a large project from Beta, so the intent will be to ride a Beta to Release."

An earlier version of Australis surfaced in Firefox 28. As we wrote in a hands-on evaluation, Australis clears the toolbar of unnecessary clutter, "dispens[ing] with the blocky tabs of the current Firefox, replacing them with curved tabs that fade into the background when not selected."