Mozilla Pulls Release Candidate of Firefox 3 Beta

A posting on the popular social news networking website Digg Wednesday morning caused Mozilla to pull the release candidate of its first beta of Firefox 3 from its servers.

On Digg, the release was reported as the first official release of Firefox 3 Beta 1, which it was not. This caused a problem for Mozilla since the release had not been properly checked by quality assurance nor had it followed the steps necessary for the beta release.

Additionally, being on the social news site obviously posed a bandwidth issue as the location where the builds were located was not equipped to handle the extra traffic that Digg would have provided.

Mozilla explained that the reason they put their release candidates online is due to the fact that they are open sources. All builds, whether they are ready for public consumption or not, are placed on the company's servers for review.

In the meantime, users wishing to get the builds will now have to do so via FTP, as access to the files via HTTP has been turned off. "We've done this to protect our own bandwidth, and also to limit the distribution of what's essentially an unfinished product," Mozilla said.