Firefox 1.0.2: no more official zip builds

Firefox 1.0.2 was released, with an update to fix a buffer overflow in GIF image processing. There's no official zip archive provided for this new Firefox version, which means that my usual installation routine doesn't work any more. How annoying. Chase Phillips offers an explanation for why the official zip archives were discontinued:

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.

I can see why there might be QA and support issues, but I also think there's a limit to how far one should go to cater for misuse by ignorant users. I used the zip builds because that was the fastest, easiest, and most reliable way of installing Firefox. For experienced users, unzipping some files from an archive is one of the easiest and fastest installation procedures imaginable. All you had to remember was to not overwrite the previous installation. This was a Firefox advantage, please don't give up on it!

My experience while updating to Firefox 1.0.2 just reinforced this view. I ran the setup program and then needed to cancel it before the actual installation started. Somehow this caused my Firefox 1.0.1 installation to refuse to start, complaining about some installation issue. A user could easily have been left without a functional web browser due to this bug. I was able to work around that but all in all, the 1.0.2 upgrade took me about five times longer than the 1.0.1 one. I'm not looking forward to dealing with the uninstallation dance that will be required next time.

Asa Dotzler suggests that those of us who prefer zip releases should download the corresponding nightly build instead. Fair enough, but knowing what build that is means keeping a much closer track on Firefox development than I've been doing before. There are also unofficial builds, but those are often aggressively optimized (faster but perhaps less stable) and there's also the problem of finding a trustworthy release builder.

24 March, 2005