preed's blah-blah-blahg

I like the quote at the end.

Oops I installed that slashdot british build. Can I install the american version over it?

Uh, I think you are going to have to go to a different mechanism in the future. Get it on all the mirrors behind an ftp username/password, then open it to anon ftp and then announce the release. Otherwise, this happens.

Yeah! Tell them! I hope this firefox 2.0 blows my mind.

Great artical, and I can't wait for 2.0 ^_^

Shame on you people for not having patience!

/me goes back to sucking the souls of idiot digg and /. posters dry

You can't really fault people who've downloaded it already when the major error was on you guy's end, accidentally making the main release page link to 2.0 a day early. As of now, [link removed] works, too, so it's hard to say people are bypassing the legit distribution mechanism to get it early.

This really fucks me off. Your loyal fans (without them you'd be nowhere) happen to stumble across the Firefox 2 file, which you put up in plain sight. They tell their friends (AS YOU HAVE BEEN MOANING AT THEM VIA SPREADFIREFOX FOR THEM TO DO FOR YEARS) and you guys don't say 'Oh well! At least the marketing effort has got off to a good start!', no, instead you belittle and fucking tell them off like school children for doing what you've been telling them to do.

No wonder Debian walks off in a sulk with you guys.

Play nice. Seriously. If you don't want this to happen, it's much easier for you to NOT UPLOAD THE FILE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

Well-written response, and while this was targetted at the current situation with Firefox, I think it can apply to far more situations and projects.

There is a tendency to jump the gun with release announcements, especially on larger projects. I have experienced this problem on projects before, and it causes no end of frustration. It may seem to be no big deal to most, but sites such as Slashdot and Digg do generate quite a bit of traffic, and bandwidth is not cheap. Projects are usually quite good at posting release announcements when they feel it is ready. It doesn't do anybody any good to decide for the project when the release be announced.

In the future, we should all practice some patience and wait for the green light from the project in question. They are, afterall, the only people who truly know when the bits are ready for download.

Keep up the good work, Paul. While there may be vocal people upset over this, there are many more who are silent and appreciative of the work you guys do.

All the nay-sayers should go read Beltzner's blog, too. We are not ashamed of the release. :) It just takes time to verify that enough mirrors have the files for the switch to be thrown.

And no, you can't password-protect it when you don't own the servers, and lots of other projects are also hosted on them. Even if they did honor our .htaccess files, it would take just as long to propagate the removal of that password restriction when it was time to remove it, which defeats the purpose.

Great job. I'll wait for my local mirror.

Re: links to FTP mirrors

You're an idiot. If thousands of people downloading Firefox might be a problem, then they SHOULDN'T BE RUNNING A MIRROR. Running a mirror implicitly makes it ok to download from that mirror. And uploading a file to a mirror implicitly makes it ok to download it. If it's not meant for public consumption then DON'T UPLOAD IT.

Preed, you're the brother I never had.

@Ben:

The fault is not their's. This is an open project, and I hope they stay that way even if it means people being impatient and downloading a day before the green light is given.

There's a reason that the files were available; it's an open project. There's also a reason why they said that the release date is tomorrow; because it's not recommended that you grab them today.

It's fabulous that you were so willing to spread the word, but come now. In all fairness, they told you exactly when the release date was, and it's your own choice if you took advantage of the nature of the open project and ignored the release date. Sorry.

But hey! It's no big deal! It's all water under the bridge! Lighten up. Breath. Smile. Enjoy Firefox tomorrow as much as you can. :D

He said it made there IT Guys Grumpy. I think they should fire them sence there is still a page up with it. How hard is it to take a page down? for Mozzila's IT Guys VERY VERY DIFFICULT maybe they could ask some one over at microsoft they can tell you how to take http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/products/download.html?product=firefox-2.0&os=win&lang=en-US) Down. or atleast show you ware the del key is so you can do like you said " to remove/retract bits that we may have to remove for some reason. "

Meh... I could care less about all of the above. I'll file it under "not my problem".

FF 2.0 looks great! But what's up with the freaking spelling problems? ;)

I think you should look at your internal practices rather than admonishing a community that adores you.

That said, would you like some cheese with your whine?

I dno't no what all yuo guys are on abuot. I don'tt nede any of the new feetures of ff2.

Let's hope that stories like this make it on the front page of those same news sites.

For those who want to help to get this a little more coverage, there is a digg story here:
http://digg.com/software/Firefox_2_is_NOT_released

Thanks for the hard work on Firefox 2.0!

I do have to say though: if you put it up on the web, people will download it. This will happen every time until you change your release process, no matter how many times you scold your users.

Oh...My...God....

I don't understand how people don't understand that files don't just magically appear on hundreds of FTP servers all at the same time...

For the clueless: The Firefox team needs to push the software out early enough for all the mirrors to have it tomorrow afternoon.

Until everything is posted and all the mirrors sync'd, they can't officially sanction the download, since parts may be missing

If you grab random incomplete software and it breaks, you have nobody to cry to except yourself - You weren't told to go get it yet, so hold your damn horses and wait, or (Novel Concept) BUILD THE FREAKIN' SOFTWARE YOURSELF (Yeah, you can do that) and you can play with it all you want. Hell, you may even find some bits that are destined for Firefox 3!

Sometimes I wonder how the open-source community doesn't completely self-destruct under the weight of its own stupidity....

Well, your blog looks GREAT from Firefox 2...sorry.

I can wait till Afternoon Pacific Time

Ah, the rants of someone who doesn't understand the industry he's in. You're here to serve the customer, chester. Make something available before it's available and people will fetch it. There's little use in whining about people fetching it when it was you that made it available in the first place. Your points about the difficulty on pushing it out are well taken, but this should serve as a fun lesson for how not to release things in the future. I'm sure you bright boys and girls can think of a way to push your stuff out the door in a way that "does not help anyone, least of all people trying to obtain Firefox builds".

this is why i've been waiting. Tried one of the RC builds and nice features, but extensions weren't up to date with 2.0 yet.

I grabbed it early. I'm guilty, but I just couldn't resist. Keep up the good work.

It's a god damn "FREE" Open Source Browser, Stop with all the whining, Uninstall the damn browser as the creators said and wait a day!

The people are trying to give as much info as possible as to why exactly they want the Damn File released on the day "THEY SAID IT SHOULD BE RELEASED" They simply want to make sure the mirrors they have are checked for consistancy and accuracy and that no Bit are Errornous.

Stop crying about something shit all the damn time and do what your told for a change, Why you idiots can't wait for shit in the first place is beyond me, especially since usually the first few people usually get a Buggy Program (no matter who makes it) anyway.

Shut the hell up and get the damn program when the makers release it and stop bitching about little shit,
The whiners on here are probably the one's that don't even Participate in the Firefox community forums or report bugs, But find any little shit the bitch about when something happens..

I gotta say, I grabbed it off Slashdot when I saw it - having been using RC3 for the past few days and enjoying the experience immensely. I guess it's lucky I'm British, and it's all working fine.
Yes, I WILL be re-downloading it when the official release goes live, just in case there's any minor changes.
Gotta say though, great post, glad you got it sorted.

Hey, FF-IT:

Some of the community who don't understand what it's like to push this stuff doesn't like your decision, but I understand. Being extra-sure that something is going to work is the right idea, and safer too. We all like FF because it's safer, right?

On top of that, which is better: to wait 24 hours for a good release that you would have had to make anyway, or taking your chances with something that may just be up as a placeholder. <flame>I'll bet the people who are complaining about this incident are the same ones who ignore compiler warnings... if they ever build at all...</flame>

In short, FF team, we love your work. Keep helping to bring good browser tech to the world.

Uhhh, maybe I'm missing something, but you're title is misleading of the content of the post.

"The Anti-release" suggests that the release was by mistake, yet, Mozilla has released every product at every release on the mirrors a day early. Seems to me this is by design.

And I completely disagree with you that getting the browser a day early is hurting Mozilla. Please. By posting a day early, you get more testers, bug fixes and reports. 24 hours more to make the browser shine.

But really, all I have to say, is if you don't want people downloading it, then don't post it. Especially, when it's under an official domain (both mozilla.org and mozilla.com have it).

Quit whining.

As much as you may be right about the bandwidth and support issues, you honestly can't expect your fiercely loyal users to know this implicitly. I downloaded Firefox 2 today from one of the mirrors (I don't recall which one) because I love Firefox and I wanted to wait for the final release. Sure, you may find yourself in a tough situation with open mirrors over which you have little control. But, I'm sorry to say it, that's your problem, not ours. Scolding your enthusiastic users is quite possibly the worst thing you could do.

Really? All you ppl flaming him? What the hell is wrong with you? He is giving you the skinny.....Download before they say "go" and you may not get what you intended to get. On top of that they get tons of bug reports and users complaining cause they think they are slick and "downloaded it early!"....which really just ends up wasting resources that could be spent making FF even better.

Personly, I can only tell these guys(and gals) one thing. Thanks for the hard work. I am very happy to have such a rock solid alternative to IE.

John

"Until everything is posted and all the mirrors sync'd, they can't officially sanction the download, since parts may be missing"

What are you smoking? we are talking about monolithic zip/gz/dmg files, if the were not complete they would be detected as corrupt.

This really isn't about mirror sites not handling the load. Unless the admin is an idiot, they don't accept connections when they are getting over loaded.

This is about the news sites like /. and digg stealing their marketing thunder. I agree it is a problem, but it is not a technical problem and it is not the news sites that are at fault. The project team needs to work with the news site BEFORE the problem not bitch about them after it happens.

Many /. and digg readers are the same folks that provide mirror sites that you are just insulting them.

And another thing all the comments about the builds being incomplete are either FUD or someone screwed up. You NEVER give any file the FINAL file name until it contains the FINAL bits. Anyone who relies on times stamps is a fool and it is a matten of 'when' not 'if' it is going to bite them in the ass. I personally think the FF team is smarter than that.

Why not cash in on the bandwidth, instead of complain about it?

These mirrors should modify the directory-browsing HTML templates to display AdSense!

It saddens me to see so many of the commenters who've obviously not read what Paul's written above.

People who actually stumble upon the build -- or better yet, who find it in the right place when looking for it (such as testers, contributors, power users, hyper interested people) are of course welcome and encouraged to download with the caveats that they're getting unreleased software.

It's people who trust Digg, Reddit, when they're told that something is the "final release version" that we're worried about. Those people won't understand why our website isn't ready, and that they're jumping the gun and thing might not work 100%.

Open source methodologies are a lot about trust, and we trust people to behave appropriately and not call something a final release until it IS a final release. So far, it isn't a final release, because the project drivers have not called it a final release.

The logic really isn't that hard to follow, is it?

People, people... It's not like the Mozilla crew has enough upload bandwith to upload to so many sites at once. If it's not mirrored, then they won't have enough download bandwidth, and people will be downloading at 1k/s from the one server. Same thing happens if they're uploading to so many servers at noon, they'll be uploading at an even slower speed. So please, have ONE DAY of patientce... It's really not THAT hard. I know everyone's hyped about the new release, I am too. I want to see my name on the release. But I'm waiting until tomorrow, because I know if I don't, i might get an incomplete build, which would degrade my experience. I'm sure none of you want a degraded experience either. So please, wait for another day, then download Fx2.0 to your hearts content!

Just one note on the release hour:

By releasing the software afternoon US time you make it more difficult for people in other continents to get the software. This could be intensional to have less traffic but the again you have multiple mirrors.

Please reconsider the release time schedule.

Unfortunately, as long as at least Digg (Slashdot can be a bit better moderated due to design) exists, this problem *will* happen again. The large masses *will* Digg up any post claiming Firefox 3 or whatever in the future is released.

So if you don't wish for this to happen again, or worse can't let it happen again, you'll have to think of alternative solutions than telling everyone to be kinder. While I agree that would be the best, human psychology doesn't work in that rational way.

It seems that everyone is looking for his 0.5 seconds of glory on the internet these days, and, indeed, there's not much any of us can do to stop them individually (except constant social education).

But I am (and have been for about a year) thoroughly disappointed with news sites, "news" sites, and software update sites (looking at you, VersionTracker and MacUpdate). These sites are being irresponsible in an effort to get the "scoop" and up their page views and all that other crap. Early posting of non-releases once, ok, it was a mistake. But doing it time and again, it's deliberate and malicious, exploiting authors' releases for the sites' benefit and doing a disservice to the users of both. Sites with ownership and editors should doubly be ashamed. (I've had a number of carefully planned, albeit much smaller-scale, releases ruined by a site jumping the gun on a release date; it sucks, and no matter the how vast your resources, you just can't compete with misleading information from the update sites....)

I'm making a call right here: news sites, "news" sites, update sites, stop posting releases early. Stop allowing your users to post releases early. Respect the wishes of the software developers, whether they're large or small. Stop being parasites and start acting like responsible members of the internet community.

To everyone ranting at the Mozilla folks: spend a day in preed's shoes and earn your livelihood from it, and you'll be singing a different tune. And, please, respect the policies of the folks bringing you the great software you love, before you ruin it for everyone (by killing the mirror network, etc.).

preed, you rock! Keep up the great work, and keep fighting the good fight.

I guess ur tactics to release Firefox 2.0 didn't work.
You can't appeal to people's good nature, when there are millions everywhere around the world waiting for the new version. I have downloaded the ENGLISH (US) Version of Firefox 2.0, frankly it was quite easy.
next time restrict the access to the sites. It'll be better.

"OpenSource is in our DNA"
Great thing you're doing since you've become .com from .org with your trademark restrictions.
We users of debian won't melt your ftp servers. Enjoy your release while jeopardizing support fron the opersource community.

For all the idiots out there who won't shut up,
"There's little use in whining about people fetching it" => No one is whining. They're telling you that if you downloaded it earlier, you're going to have issues or complaints. You're going to be unhappy. You're also going to cause them a great deal of trouble. Is this that hard to see? If you're that eager to get it early, go build it yourself. You should see that it was a mistake and quit it with your all-wise "you learned your lesson" attitude. No one's telling anyone off, no one's bitching about you. They're plainly telling news sites not to report every mis-release to a few million people. I think they should round up the people who flame around recklessly somwhere and make *them* pay the bandwidth costs.

Most posters here are idiots, nevermind them and they might evaporate.. :)

Go firefox team! Thanks ALOT for the great effort you've put in over the years. Really looking forward to this new release! /bow

Behaviour is not spelt incorrectly.

Thanks for the good work, I'll wait for the real release. Ignore the people who are demanding a release a day early. Do the job properly and ignore the hysterical noise.

Rob.

Whats needed here is a timed release mechanism for all these mirror servers.

1. Upload/Sync your release to an offline staging area (on the same logical partition as the final release area). This area will not be visible to the public on the mirror. You would also set a dat/time for go-live or something.
2. At the go-live date/time, all the mirror servers move the content to the correct, publicly visible location - at the same time. This would be effectively instant as they are just altering the inode/fat/whatever.

Maybe there is a project opportunity here somehwere. It cant be that hard to implement/provide to the mirror hosters.

Once in place, people who want their uploads in place but do NOT want them to be available early, can use this if it is so important to them.

There is no grounds for complaint if people start downloading something that you have made available. Welcome to the interwebnet.

That said, I am looking forward to seeing what FF2 brings... No disrespect meant to you guys :)

Thanks for your hard work!

I actually must agree with Ben and also say that Ive downloaded what I thought was the real deal (maybe still think it is) my bad but I can live with it. However it would be nice with something like "beta" or RC#X when I look at the "About Firefox" Because as a layman all I can see is Firefox 2.0 which for me says its the real thing. What to think?

i think FF is a phenomena ... and its FREE ... what do anyone expect.... all are hungry foxes.... and FF is the sexy bitch... aaaooooooooooooooooo

PS: on a serious note, all said and done, FF 2.0 shouldn't have been on the FTP servers anyway cos places like Digg and /. are like paparazzi and FF is like the star, dont blame the paparazzi, take precautions.

Well said Smokey!

"we trust people to behave appropriately and not call something a final release until it IS a final release"

Hopefully you've learnt your lesson, then. Try something else.

Man, sometimes I'm really glad that I'm working for a project that isn't as wide-spread as this browser you are talking about. And sometimes I'm glad some posters in here are "your" community rather than "mine".
But then, the project and community I'm working in is part of this larger project and community, which also deleiovers this great, widespread browser everyone is talking about. Isn't that great?
And then, oh, stuff like this ahppens. I'm wondering why the FTP servers we all share are at the edge of breaking down, and I'm informed that people can't grab SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Sunbird and several extensions the way they want, because Some people are too stupid to wait for releases and post wrong links too early. Hell, our nightly testers can't test builds because the wrong servers are completly overloaded, beacuse of stupid posters that circumvent intelligent round-robin and load balancing systems.

Paul, I'm completely feeling with you on this - but reality shows that it's quite hard not to run into this ugly situation. I'm just glad I only have to care about "my" tiny SeaMonkey releases, not "your" huge Firefox ones...

if you guys really want to check out ff 2.0 without waiting why not download a rc or just boot up the rc of ubuntu edgy (live cd) which has a pre release on it ;)

I've always thought of the mozilla crew to be extremely competent and have spread their greatness with proudness.

Then there was today. FF2 "gets released" a day early.
Reaction: Bah, doesnt matter. Even if someone made a mistake I still have confidence in them. Chill.

Then there was this blogpost. Face off. I see you now. You are no longer the knights in shining armour. FF is no longer perfect.

Crisismanagement has been appauling.

Good job shooting yourself in the foot. So stupid, so stupid.

I'm sorry, i'm no apache/httpd genius, but I do know how to password protect a directory. Maybe you should take a lesson out of Fedora's book, they too are making a release today (far more significant than a 5MB download) and the majority of mirrors I have seen have the tree for this release password protected/restricted. One of the key aspects of open source is communication, thus begs the question, why did you not talk to the server admins (including your own) and restrict this directory, I'm not an IT professional, yet it would only take me 5 seconds to carry out such an action. Fair enough, take on board what has happened, and discuss it at a senior level, but do not flame your users, the community, that is a bad business practice, profit making or not!!!

Ryan wrote,

Ah, the rants of someone who doesn't understand the industry he's in. You're here to serve the customer, chester.

I think it's you who doesn't understand. You are not a customer. You are being offered a gift. You and some of the other posters here should start acting like it.

Greets to those who understand the situation.

Those who dont, try finding out what releases.mozilla.org is for and then start blabbing.. and oh, read the whole article(s) / posts 'properly' before you tell yourself that you're an expert now!!

I don't care, all I do is sit here and wait for my Firefox to update itself. :P

Seems like a pretty poor arguement. How does it put mirrors out of business by us downloading it a day earlier? In all honesty it only helps the mirrors. People will download the software either way, but at least now you get people doing so over the space of 2 days not 1 and thus reducing server load. If the server cant cope with that then how on earth will they cope when its officially announced?

Secondly as has already been pointed out it allows for further testing.

Thirdly, what is the chance that 1 or two bits arent correct. Seriously guys you know that for the 10 megs or whatever the chance of that is very very low.

Seriously you should be grateful people are jumping to get this, if you feel theres still issues then don't post the file to the servers. I fail to see how people downloading this has hurt Mozilla or its mirrors in any way imaginable. And like I said it only spreads the server load over the space of 2 days instead of having everyone jump to it tomorrow and getting frustrated when the server isnt responding as a result of a higher load.

*sigh*
I understand all your points but you are simply too naive if you believe that people would stand down from reporting/linking.

Many news sites are dependant on page views for the income, and "being first" can be the difference of several thousands of dollars. And last time I checked the majority of the world is ruled by capitalism.

Sure, it may be immoral or cause some inconvenience for someone else, but this is 2006 and that is how news reporting works. Learn from it & live with it because you can't change it.

The generic solution for your points; lock down the mirrors until actual release and use Bittorrent to lighten the load.

Again, your view is too naive and will never happen. If Slashdot or Digg won't report, then someone else will and you're still in for the same scenario.

I know it's sad, but that is the reality we're living in, and you're not gonna change it by mere words.

I am not going to say either way how I feel about this... But just think to your self before you leave a comment, would you feel difrently if it was IE7 we were talking about?

FF 2.0 is out early? Really? I'm gonna rush right out and download stick to my habit of waiting a few days after the release date to get a copy. Thanks, Preed.

Is everyone aware that SpreadFirefox have Firefox 2 buttons and banners available for download (linking to 1.5.0.7 I might add).

FF2 looks great!

Killing a mirror site eh.
this seems. like a lesson should be learned and that maybe we should all evolve. P2P file sharing has matured to a point, that majors release can be done in this manner. saving the mirrors sites. thousands of dollars in overage charges. and just use me and my verizon connection that get unlimited transfer.
Also you (mozilla) made the mistake of letting the information getting out. maybe not directly but through poor management of who you give links to. quit your bitching and be happy that so many people want your product

Preed,

First off, don't reprimand the users for downloading Firefox 2.0 early. Truthfully the majority of users that I know downloaded it directly from Mozilla's FTP and HTTP servers and mirror farm.

While I agree that folks can be patient and wait, Mozilla can do their part by not making the file accessible to the public until you are ready to release it. If you don't want your mirrors to get hammered, then don't put the file out for anonymous users to gain access too. Take a queue from the Fedora Project. They lock down each of their release folders until they are ready to distribute them to the public, and require the same thing of their mirrors. Of course, I know you are extremely aware of this already, but this would seem to be a better thing to do than to lash out at the community for downloading it early. Take some steps to protect the user experience.

Now don't get me wrong, I agree with you on several points you made. We should be patient, we shouldn't link directly to files that may or may not be legit, we shouldn't submit stories to Slashdot or Digg before the release is ready, however this can all be solved by Mozilla simply locking down the servers until the release is ready. In my opinion, Mozilla is just as much to blame as is the community that willfully supports them.

Why isn't there a torrent tracker for Mozilla products? That would solve a lot of the bandwidth problems too.

If you really are worried about mirrors using altered files of Mozilla Firefox for mailicous purposes then how come whenI download FF1.5 from the official link why is it sent via an unencrypted link and wihtout an MD5, SHA1, or GPG signiture?

Signing a file isn't that hard is it? The Linux distributions have been signing all their packages for a while.

If Mozilla really cared about user security then they would be signing their files along with instructions on how to varify the file. The fact they fail to follw this simple procedure indicates they do not see security as important, or atleast not the security of delivery (FF itself is reasonably secure as far as I can see).

(Any spelling mistakes are the fault of me not having FireFox 2.0)

I love Firefox... and while I certainly would not stop using it, recommending it or keeping my various machines up to date with it, this entry is in extremely poor taste.

It is not the fault of your users when you make a mistake. It is not up to us (I knew nothing about this, but I include myself because I am indeed a user of Firefox) to mysteriously understand your intentions or lack thereof.

While the slashdotting was not something you could control, it's still just a symptom of your failure. Yes, failure. Everyone fails sometimes; when you do, admitting you have is a good idea, and helps everyone. Pinning it on others is a poor way to handle yourself; pinning it on your customers, users and fans is beyond poor taste, it's stupid.

Don't be stupid. Don't talk down to us for your mistakes.

Go back to whatever it is you do. Obviously, PR is not your strong suit.

Mozilla should simply populate mirrors (make release) via Bittorrent (only) for at least a couple of days, and not ftp or http. Simply make a torrent of the entire folder and tell the world to get it; unlike ftp, the more the better :)

PD: In the morning of 24, Ubuntu was pretty quick in providing the 2.0 release via its upgrade system, just in time for Edgy Eft release in 2 days.

so i'm following what preed said and it's now after 5pm here on the east coast and the official page has not shown any changes. what's the hold up? if you know people are so excited for it that they're going to the ftp and mirrors without the link from mozilla.com's website, you should be getting it out there as quickly as possible.

Thanks for spoiling the 2.0 release PREED. You pissed all over it and pretty much ruined the mood with your crying. You can't blame the FF users for your own ignorance and naivety. You should be fired for your unprofessional spew.

As someone mentioned earlier, what are you smoking? ...talking about not having all the "bits". It's funny that the version I downloaded yesterday has the exact same checksum as the "official" release.

Go firefox development team! And a month-long penalty of using IE 2.0 for all the complainers.

Personally not only is Preed correct but I do not risk production machines until a Firefox release is at least a week old.

I love it when *other* people take the hit for bugs. I will put release candiates up and comment on how the engine renders for example a source code article with figures. (Worst case rendering that tends to go to bugzilla then to the test suite.)

Good work Preed!

One suggestion. The system is broke a bit here. Put in a item in a very small file to put for example RC? in these ftp servers then pull that very small file at launch. I always have a "BETA RCX" stuck in mine and pull that tiny text file when done.

Cheers

What
da F.F????

y'all (I'll not draw flame calling out specific negative commentors,
this isn't romper room) this is UGLY.

First and above all, let us all remember that F.F. is an OPEN SOURCE
software. THANK GOD! Which is why some of these openly unkind remarks
puzzle me - I've dinked around in the "open" community over 10 years
now... Never made enough effort to productively participate, the best
I've been able to muster has been bemused, but enthusiastic
spectatorship.

The thing is, this is the first time I've ever seen such unkind, plain
out ugly, discourse regarding an Open Source project.

And until I saw this sad little exchange, I had taken something very
valuable for granted:

It seems that in Open Source community there's an unspoken, just simply
adopted code of GOOD WILL TOWARD OUR FELLOW MAN.

Tolerance, humor, constructive suggestions but not derision.

Those who demand perfection, and have a need to verbally punish folks
who supply us with SURPASSING (not just excellent) tools should perhaps
go back to using the dross supplied at u$orial Expen$e by Mr. Gate'$
Miro-$au$age emporium.

Sincerely

Skavenger

I don't think all this arging and barging really matters too much.

I think the FF team have done a great job, and this incident simply shows how it can be difficult to propogate files around the world prior to a release without someone jumping on them mid way.

There's little point in securing the download sites, since the entire source is open anyway. There's nothing to stop someone downloading the source tree tag marking the 2.0 release (never looked at the mozilla repository, but i'm guessing it's fairly obvious) and building the installer, and uploading THAT to their own server. But what's the point - yay - you get to see the subtle differences between FF2-RCn and the final release before anyone else. Woop dee doo!

I agree that the real problem here is people downloading the file thinking that it's the final release. In this case, it seems to have been ok - i.e. it was bit-for-bit identical to the final release. But in general nothing should be trusted other than the official release. I believe that that's the real message in the OP.

The FF team have put in place systems to make the roll-out as smooth as possible, and that includes a bit of time to make sure mirrors are all OK before the final 'official' release. Bypassing these safeguards simply increases the chance of something going wrong. Unsupported 'unofficial' releases becoming wide-spread can undermine the overall trust people have in the package. I can relate to the frustration of the FF team, when people bypass their hard work.

Think of it like this - are you ever so hungry that you'd run round the McDonalds counter, grab your burger out of the frier and shove it in your mouth? Then you're crazy. Also, don't expect any sympathy if you complain that your fingers got burnt.

My answer to the people ranting against the OP is to either:

1) Download the proper release candidates only
or
2) Become one of the developers.

Those who were saying it's an extra chance to fix bugs - unfortunately, at this point, it's too late. At that time the release was finished anyway.

My experience was pretty painless, i was curious about what FF2 would look like, so i downloaded RC2 from the official source. Then as if by magic, it's now updated itself to full-on FF2.0 maybe it auto-updated while my wife was using the PC, who knows. Who cares? Anyway, it's great.

It's all history now. I expect the majority of FF users won't even realise that FF2 is out until a few weeks time, and by then, none of this will matter.

Dangit, first you remove my free will and make me lust uncontrollably after Firefox releases. Then you upload 2.0 early and force me to download it even if I don't want to. Then you force me to come to your site and read about how it might not be the best idea to download software before it's released!

Well, screw you! I'm the customer who hasn't paid or contributed anything and has benefitted from your years of blood, sweat, and tears! As soon as you stop forcing me to use Firefox, I'm taking my lack of business elsewhere!

Seriously, though, I feel your pain. Congratulations on the (slightly bumpy) release of an awesome browser.

I know a lot of people like clearing their cookies every time Firefox is closed, but it's never fun to log into your most-used web apps over and over again. By setting exceptions in the Cookies tab of the Firefox privacy options, you can exclude cookie deletion by domain so that you retain the cookies you need while getting rid of the rest. Handy.

This link will show you how to delete all cookies in Firefox on closing, EXCEPT for those from selected domains... very useful!
http://mungobah.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-delete-all-cookies-in-firefox-on.html

Sorry for late comment: There are no archived elder released localized Tb- and Fx-builds on mozilla.com, only recent ore elder en-US ones. At the moment people of international support forums ask for TB 1.5.0.7-build to downgrade because of bug:360409. The only way to give them this build is to link on ftp.mozilla :(. For details see: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=488779
Thx for attention.

The only way to give them this build is to link on ftp.mozilla

This is significantly less egregious than posting direct ftp links to builds that no longer exist.

Having said that, if those builds are in the releases module, linking to releases.mozilla.org would be better; download.mozilla.org links would actually be best, though.

You just need to take the link for, i.e. 2.0, and replace the product version. So, if you wanted Tb 1.5.0.7 links, you'd use something like:

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=thunderbird-1.5.0.7&os=win&lang=bg

(With the appropriate OS/language, of course.)

Preed,

Despite what some of these people are saying? good job with the article and keep up the good work!