Should the Mozilla team overthink their public ftp strategy ?

The availability of an untested Firefox 3 Beta 1 version on the public Mozilla ftp site has shown it once again that this information makes it on the big news sites such as Digg. This sends masses of users to the ftp which is neither prepared for the storm nor ready to deliver a version that has not been tested.

The Firefox development team reacted and created a webpage for users who wanted to reach the ftp site by clicking on a link at Digg.com. This article explained why it was not advised to download this version yet unless you wanted to take part in the beta testing process. Their reasoning was that the version was untested, did not make it through quality tests yet and that it was not mirrored properly.

What bothers me a little bit is that they do make this unfinished version available on a public ftp especially if they know that this can cause massive confusion on part of the user.

I’m thinking that putting those releases on a private part of the ftp with access for testers only would clean up this mess and prevent that similar things happen in the future.

The public ftp should only contain official releases that have passed the testing process and are properly mirrored. This can be beta versions and release candidates but not untested versions.