Firefox 4.0 (stable) available for download on Mozilla's FTP | Hacker News Reader

Firefox 4.0 (stable) available for download on Mozilla's FTP

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65 pointsSaltwaterC15 comments

Every single time a new Firefox version is about to come out, someone jumps the gun and writes a blog post like this, linking directly to a single Mozilla FTP server. Usually, they're actually linking to a release candidate anyway, but as a matter of practice, you should use the links that Mozilla provides on the Firefox download page in order to take advantage of their system of mirrors (e.g., http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefo...).

In this case if you're running the RC, you're already running 4.0.

These actually work:

OSX: http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefo...

Win: http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefo...

Linux: http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefo...

However, they're the same as RC2 (sha1sum confirms). Not uncommon though for Mozilla to release a RC as stable version without any modifications besides the version bump.

If the version was bumped, the sha1sum ought to be different no?

Once it hits RC stage, version bumps are in the filename only.

I was talking about an older major release (3.0 and 3.0 RC2 were identical IIRC). Even 4.0 RC1 had Firefox/4.0 into the user agent string as well as into the About panel.

Hi, I work for Mozilla. Firefox 4 will be released tomorrow, March 22 (Tuesday).

But you don't need to wait to download it - if you are running Firefox 4.0rc2, then you are running the exact bits that we plan to ship as 4.0 final. Download the RC from http://firefox.com/rc

It seems like a waste of bandwidth for it to have downloaded a 12MB (roughly) update just to change the version info. Are there any plans to implement a Chrome-like binary diffing update system, now that Mozilla is moving to more frequent releases?

If you are running RC2, you won't need to download any update, because there is no version info to change. All the version numbers in the release candidates just say "4.0".

Mozilla already uses binary diffs for updates, and we already release security and stability updates about once a month.

Thanks for pointing that out - I was wondering about why I was seeing 4.0 since yesterday when it updated itself.

Mozilla does have an incremental update system called MAR (Mozilla ARchive):

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Software_Update:MAR

You should really wait until this hits their front page. The FF front page still has 3.6.15 as the latest.

I don't understand why we should wait. Why?

I think he was directing that statement more at the article poster saying that it is generally better to wait for a company to get everything in order and ready for an official release than to try to scoop it and post links to unrelated blogs that have further links to unofficial mirrors.

If you want to get a copy of Firefox 4 before tomorrow morning, I applaud and welcome you. You can download the RC2 which others have mentioned is identical to the final release, or you can use one of the links above to the mozilla website.

Time savers:

Mac (en-US): ftp://mozilla.fastbull.org//mozilla/firefox/releases/4.0/mac/en-US/Firefox%204.0.dmg

Win32 (en-US): ftp://mozilla.fastbull.org//mozilla/firefox/releases/4.0/win32/en-US/Firefox%20Setup%204.0.exe

Linux x86_64 (en-US): ftp://mozilla.fastbull.org//mozilla/firefox/releases/4.0/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-4.0.tar.bz2

Linux i686 (en-US): ftp://mozilla.fastbull.org//mozilla/firefox/releases/4.0/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-4.0.tar.bz2

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