Mozilla Puts the Lid on Firefox 3.0 Beta Leak

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Mozilla has urged visitors to their FTP site to ignore the widely publicized leak of Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 (RC) after the news broke earlier today on Digg.com. Visitors are now redirected to a page explaining why it's not cool to start using their latest browser before official quality control has reviewed and released the beta for public consumption.

Firefox 3 contains the highly anticipated "Places" extension that replaces Bookmarks and keeps tabs on your most frequently visited sites, effectively combining Bookmarks & History to an extent as well as revamped download and add-on managers. Users who managed to grab the beta before it was pulled have reported that almost all of their extensions do not work but plugins do and the new features more than make up for it.

The following announcement appeared on the Mozilla website:

At around 4am PST today, the last of the Firefox 3 Beta 1 release candidate builds appeared on our public FTP. This was mistakenly reported on Digg as the official release of the first Firefox 3 Beta. It’s extremely flattering to get this sort of attention, and we know that it’s motivated by the very best of intentions, but it does cause us three major problems:

The release candidate builds have not been thoroughly tested by our QA group,
we haven’t completed all the steps required for a beta release (see below), and
these builds aren’t being mirrored properly on our servers.

Before a release candidate is released to the public we let our Quality Assurance team put it through a bunch of tests.

View: Full Announcment @ Mozilla Developer News

(1 reply) #1 eAi on 08 Nov 2007 - 16:25

Can't anyone just build it from source?

#1.1 cykosis on 08 Nov 2007 - 16:30

They didnt taken any of the files down. They just redirected to that warning page because some people thought that these were official builds.

(2 replies) #2 -Dave- on 08 Nov 2007 - 16:32

and this is different from the nightly builds how ?

#2.1 night_stalker_z on 08 Nov 2007 - 16:56

Quote - (-Dave- said @ #2)

It fixes some bugs.

#2.2 Jugalator on 08 Nov 2007 - 17:25

Quote - (night_stalker_z said @ #2.1)

And the nightlies that follow a day or two later will fix some bugs in beta 1...

I'd say that there's no special difference in this case, because this hasn't been quality controlled properly. So essentially it sounds like just a snapshot of a nightly. The "real" beta 1 should however be different in that it has had some extra time spent on it to check if any especially bad bugs are there, something that you don't get at all with nightlies.

#3 Denver_80203 on 08 Nov 2007 - 21:55

Places idea can go either way.. sounds like the "personalized menus" in Windows which I promptly turn off. It would hide stuff I hadn't looked at in a while or re-arrange things unpredictably.

But, firefox has a good history of doing things well.. we'll see

(1 reply) #4 tehmiller on 09 Nov 2007 - 02:29

Quote -

Users who managed to grab the beta before it was pulled have reported that almost all of their extensions do not work but plugins do and the new features more than make up for it.

It's not like people can't still get the same thing, just as Jugalator said, it is essentially the nightly builds. I have been using it for the last month or so (getting the latest nightly build every morning when I get to work), and it is coming along nicely, and the add-on fiasco is to be expected with any new major release I would think.

#4.1 +shakey_snake on 09 Nov 2007 - 09:32

You can always use Nightly Tester Tools to bump version numbers (or you can do this manually) if you want to roll the dice with some extension you don't think you can live without.

Of course it' probably best not telling people this...

(1 reply) #5 alsheron on 09 Nov 2007 - 10:52

Is it just me or is Firefox 3 a MASSIVE disappointment? You have to wonder what all the time has taken and where exactly it was spent?

#5.1 TSThomas on 10 Nov 2007 - 11:35

Check here;

http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/rele...-firefox-3.html

What's new on the trunk (for Gecko 1.9 / Firefox 3)

This page tries to list the largest improvements in Firefox trunk (for Firefox 3) over Firefox 2.0.0.x. Last updated November 6, 2007, the day Firefox 3 beta 1 branched.

Covers; New browser features, User interface improvements and changes, New web developer features, New extension developer features, Architectural changes, Notable bug fixes, Internationalization, Performance, Security improvements & Target platform changes

Last edited by TSThomas on 10 Nov 2007 - 11:40

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