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May 2, 2005

Update System

One of the biggest difficulties that the Mozilla Foundation has encountered in the months following the Firefox 1.0 release has been managing the Software Update System for distributing updates to 1.0 users. We had never done anything of this scale before, and the system in place is representative of approximately a week worth of work on my part prior to 1.0 with little understanding of the problems that the Mozilla release team would end up facing.

In this light, improving the Software Update System has become a primary objective for Firefox 1.1. We have already met several times, and there are groups now working on the various pieces of the system. Darin Fisher and I will be working on the client side segments, with help and input from Benjamin Smedberg, Doug Turner, Daniel Veditz, Chase Phillips, Chris Beard et al. I have developed some initial UI mocks which you can find on the Mozilla Wiki in the Software Update section, along with some growing but rough design documentation for the client side piece. Darin has figured out how to get binary patching working, and is working on a system for incremental background update download. I will post updates about the client side pieces as they develop further.

Posted by ben at May 2, 2005 1:01 PM

Comments

Is this update mechanism upgrade going to avoid the need to run the actual install package again, so that you don't have to go through the steps of choosing a directory, optional components, etc over and over?

Posted by: dani at May 13, 2005 8:35 AM

I thought comments were broken? testing

Posted by: Test at May 13, 2005 11:01 PM

FireFox opens ports to ebay.doubleclick.net. Why???

Posted by: Jim at May 24, 2005 8:38 PM

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