March 22, 2005
- Wondering why there are no .zip files for the Fx and Tb 1.0.2 releases? - Some people have been wondering why there are no .zip files for the Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0.2 releases. The reason for this is that the Mozilla Foundation has discontinued issuing them for our major releases to avoid the user confusion it was causing. During previous releases, a number of people grabbed the .zip package and used that in their Firefox installation directory. When Firefox 1.0.1 rolled around, they grabbed the .exe installer package. When they setup 1.0.1 using the installer, a lot of them chose the same installation location in which they'd unzipped the .zip file. This led to their Firefox 1.0.1 installation crashing repeatedly and (very!) mysteriously. We tracked down the cause of the large number of Talkback incidents we were receiving late-late-late into the night of the Firefox 1.0.1 release to being caused by misuse of the .zip and .exe packages. It was obvious then there was no quick fix. The smartest thing for us to do was reduce our configuration management/QA complexity while simplifying user experience by assisting those less savvy among us in selecting the correct file to use for their platform. For Windows, people should use the .exe package. If you're a Mozilla developer and love the .zip files, rest assured they aren't going away completely. While we won't issue the .zip package with the rest of the major release files, we will still issue these packages in their standard nightly form.... (17:13 | 187 Comments)
- Snow Crash - Photo courtesy of morgamic.... (15:30)