Mozilla vs. Sys Admins

Ever since Firefox was first released, I’ve been a fan. I think that the browser has done great over the years and has defiantly given Microsoft a reason to improve Internet Explorer. While I love Firefox as a user, I’ll admit that I have never liked it from the perspective of a Systems Administrator. The application is always providing challenges in its deployment to remote systems. Once you think you’ve got it figured out, the developers seem to throw something into the mix that messes things up. Up until recently, I was willing to look past this. But now something new, at least new to me, has came up that has just made think that the developers at Mozilla are purposely trying to make Systems Administrator’s lives miserable.

File versioning. Mozilla doesn’t seem to understand the concept. Take version 1.5.0.11. If you look very closely at firefox.exe when you install 1.5.0.11, you will see that the actual version of the file is 1.8.20070.31202. Okay, this isn’t that big of a deal. At least not until you look at 2.0.0.3. Firefox.exe for 2.0.0.3 is 1.8.20070.30919. Look closely at those numbers. Firefox 2.0.0.3 actually has a lower version number than Firefox 1.5.0.11. So when you develop a script that says to install Firefox 2.0.0.3 if the version is less than 1.8.20070.30919, it won’t upgrade 1.5.0.11. What was Mozilla thinking?

The only think I can think of is that Firefox 2.0.0.3 may have been released prior to 1.5.0.11 and the version numbers are meant to track the releases over time. But with this methodology, it makes it much more difficult for administrators to automate the upgrade of Firefox. Especially from 1.5.0.11 to 2.0.0.3. Now yes, there are ways to script around this. That’s not the point. I just personally think, and I’m sure a lot of Systems Administrators will agree with me, that a file version should be larger for a newer version of software. Or in the case of 1.5.x and 2.0.x, make them distinguishable by doing something like 1.8.x for 1.5.x and 1.9.x for 2.0.x. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 12:45 am and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.