Looking at FTP sites for Mozilla releases

Apparently there are a few websites reporting that Firefox 1.5 has been released, because it’s on the FTP server. These sites need to reel themselves back in.

To quote David Baron:

“It hasn’t shipped yet, it’s on the FTP site in preparation for being shipped. “

and Dave Miller:

“very few people (in the grand scheme of things) watch the FTP site 24 hours a day waiting for the next file to show up. Getting it on the FTP site is one of the FIRST steps of the process of actually shipping a release. It has to be on the FTP site for an hour or two (to give it time to propagate across our FTP mirror network) before any of the web pages are posted, otherwise there’ll be nothing to link to from the web pages. If the download page (http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/) doesn’t link to it yet, there’s no reason to expect any other web pages about it to exist yet either.”

Dave gave a link to the Mozilla Application Suite, because that’s what was being discussed. Those quotes apply to all Mozilla product releases. The people jumping the gun may end up regretting it. There is supposed to be a re-organization of Mozilla web content happening soon, making Mozilla.com the end-user site. Mozilla contributers have eluded to this happening during the release of Firefox 1.5.