Mozilla testing progressive updates on Firefox and Thunderbird

Mozilla Foundation is beginning to alpha test the latest changes in their open source software Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. They have asked volunteers to help them test out these new changes in the applications. The company is implementing a new module in their software, which would let the end users progressively update their applications. So, when this update is complete, users would be able to download smaller patches from the Mozilla servers and update their browser and mail applications.

Now, for doing the updates, users have to download the latest versions and reinstall them over existing installation to get the updates. This can become cumbersome for minor updates, which are more frequent. Dialup users are also reluctant to download complete applications repeatedly just to get the latest updates.

The news was posted on the Mozilla Quality Blog, which said: “We are now ready to do some testing of software update for both Firefox and Thunderbird. To that end, we have a page up on our new QA Community wiki that explains how to test the software update feature.” The organization is not asking for the beta testers to register for testing and submitted the bugs in this implementation.

The organization is thinking of implementing these updates in the upcoming major releases of Thunderbird and Firefox. Mozilla Firefox 1.5 is as of now scheduled to come out sometime next month.