The Mozilla Project has stopped providing .zip versions of Firefox and Thunderbird releases, thus rendering MozUpdate virtually useless. I wouldn’t complain—Mozilla is free software, after all—except that Firefox and Thunderbird’s installers have a history of clobbering settings and deleting files.

I’ve been using MozUpdate exclusively to install Firefox and Thunderbird on Windows machines for almost two years now, and although my opinion is obviously biased seeing as how I wrote it, I think it’s far better than the half-assed, buggy official installers, not to mention easier to use and far more convenient.

MozUpdate depends on those .zip archives though, and since I don’t have the resources or the desire to provide .zip archives of Firefox and Thunderbird myself, it looks like MozUpdate is going to have to die. My apologies to anyone who used it. I’ve always enjoyed developing it, and I had some big plans for its future, but for now I guess we’ll all have to make do with the official installer.

Mozilla is still providing .zip versions of nightly builds, but limiting MozUpdate to installing nightlies would eliminate one of its most appealing features: the ability to try a nightly build with the safety net of being able to revert back to an official release with just a few clicks, preserving all your preferences (assuming the nightly build wasn’t so buggy that it deleted them, of course).

I’m going to install Firefox 1.0.2 now. Hopefully it won’t delete anything I care about. Wish me luck.