Mozilla throttles auto-updates for the first week or so to watch for surprise regressions. Firefox Beta and Nightly users are not representative of Release channel users, who often have slower hardware, less RAM, and crashy anti virus software. You can bypass the throttling by opening the About Firefox dialog to force an update check.
> You can bypass the throttling by opening the About Firefox dialog to force an update check.
This didn't work. Opening that dialog doesn't seem to trigger anything, and I don't see any button within it either.
Posts on HN don't need to be rolled out slowly to spread out the load a bit and your browser doesn't check updates every few seconds if there's only one expected every few weeks.
I don't know the specifics for Firefox in particular, but update checks are classically staggered over at least a full day if not longer. You don't want every user of your product to hit your download servers at the same time.
I don't think that load on the download servers is an issue now. CDNs do a great job of distribution the load. The concern is more that some bugs (especially GPU related) only show up "in the wild". A slow rollout limits the damage if there is a show-stopping bug in the release.
Whereas HN submissions can submit directly after a package release, maintainers still have a lot of work to do.