By the time you’re reading this, it’s been several days that an update for Mozilla Firefox has been available. Here’s my impressions on the update.

After the initial announcement on MozillaZine.org, I was almost surprised to see so many problems in the upgrade, considering the experience accumulated over the past upgrades. It’s odd that the automatic update notifications had to be delayed because of the high traffic expected, and that so many mistakes (bad links, mixed OS versions, etc.) are still made.

However, it’s the transparency of the process and growing pains that fascinates me the most. I was able to quickly grasp the problems I would have if I updated right away, so I decided to wait for one week until the dust had settled and only then notify my customers.

So far I have upgraded over 40 workstations used in office environments and home offices without a single problem. However I had to guide several users thourgh manually clicking on accepting the MPL once again, clicking through several default install screens, and most importantly, deleting the full 1.01 install archive that was left on the desktop! It’s weird an upgrade this « small » would need fully reinstalling.

Here’s someone else’s account on surviving this install.

Check this changelog for a list of the most important updates and security bugfixes included in this upgrade.