September 1, 2005

Binary patching lives!

Morgamic just threw the switch on partial updates. Now, when your Firefox nightly build checks for updates, it will pull down a partial update (200-400 kilobytes) instead of a full update. Sweet!

Posted by darin at September 1, 2005 2:31 PM
Comments

Very nice! This is surely one of the most useful features of the new release for many people and one that, although perhaps not that exciting for everyday use, will make dialup users' lives a heck of a lot easier.

Posted by: Chris Blore at September 1, 2005 2:56 PM

does it also work for the l18n builds in ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-mozilla1.8-l10n ?

Posted by: pascal at September 1, 2005 3:55 PM

Awesome! This will go well since it'll be tested a bit before the Firefox 1.5 Beta. I can't wait to update to tomorrows build! :D

Posted by: Chris at September 1, 2005 4:33 PM

Is there some sort of hidden setting besides the prefs tab that you need to enable for this to work on Linux? I haven't had any auto updates at all, partial or full, and every time I force it to check it says there aren't any available.

Posted by: ant at September 1, 2005 4:39 PM

Pascal, I don't think there's support for the l10n nightly builds yet.

Ant, what build are you running? Can you list list the UA string?

Posted by: Darin at September 1, 2005 4:48 PM

Yes:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050831 Firefox/1.0+

I've tried the last 3 nightly builds as well with no luck.

Posted by: ant at September 1, 2005 5:15 PM

Ant, I think it is not working for you because you are using an en-GB build. I think we're only setup for en-US at the moment. I'm not sure what the schedule is for supporting localized builds of Firefox.

Posted by: Darin at September 1, 2005 5:20 PM

Ah, it was because I'd changed the UA locale string from the default. I reset it and it works fine now :)

Posted by: ant at September 1, 2005 5:36 PM

Great news! This is going to be one of the best improvements in 1.5.

Posted by: Rishi at September 1, 2005 6:08 PM

Sweet. Really great work, all who have contributed! This will even further ease the spreading of this great software!

Posted by: David Naylor at September 1, 2005 8:55 PM

I was so surprised this morning when the update downloaded only 247Kb!!!
This is amazing... great job guys!
In a not-to-distant future Camino, Seamonkey and Sunbird should distribute updates with this method, too.

Posted by: Riccardo Cretti at September 2, 2005 1:46 AM

Today's branch daily update from 2005090106 to 2005090207 did not do a binary update, got the full .mar push...others in the build forum are reporting the same.

Posted by: Littlemutt at September 2, 2005 9:43 AM

Yeah, I just noticed the same thing. Chase informs me that there was a problem with the binary patch generation this morning, and a solution is in the works.

Posted by: Darin Fisher at September 2, 2005 10:53 AM