The Release Note

Wow… there has been a ton of release activity mostly around Flock 1.2 So much so I haven’t had a chance to keep you all updated with in a reasonable time frame. This is going to be a pretty long blog post with lots of detail. Grab a cup of coffee and I’ll fill you in.

Since the last blog post on this blog we had an emergency rollout of 1.1.4 to accommodate a Facebook change. The change unfortunately could not be done with as a web detective fix. This was probably one of the quickest turnaround times from bug discovery to in the field fixes we’ve ever done. The bug was discovered on the evening of May 12 and the fix was turned around and out in the field by May 13th. The ironic part was just as we were deploying the fix after an exhausting 24 hours, Facebook changed their page again. Fortunately this second change was fixable via web detective. It was very impressive to see everyone at Flock mobilize to fix this bug so quickly.

But that’s all old news. We’ve recently released Flock 1.2 (and shortly afterwards 1.2.1). First, and very excitingly, we’ve added two new localizations.

• en-GB - Queen’s English translation thanks to bouncysteve!
• zh-TW - Traditional Chinese thanks to Hillwood!

Flock 1.2.1 was released two days later when realized we were sending what some people would call private information to Digg. Basically, there was a feature in the RSS reader that would let you know if the article in the feed had been dugg or not. To do this we were sending over the feed article in the clear to Digg in an API call. Since we take our user’s privacy seriously we decided to yank out this feature. We’ve been working with Digg to provide a way for us to send an encrypted hash to avoid any privacy issues in the future.

The final little challenge for 1.2.1 was getting the automatic updates out. One of the things we monitor is the rate of daily update pings that comes in from the Flock browsers. A significant dip usually means that there is a bug in the field that is causing people to stop using the browser. About 3 days after turning on the automatic updates we saw a significant dip in update pings but no corresponding storm of feedback in email or on our forums about something being broken. This was troubling and confusing. We were worried that we had either broke Flock so bad that people were not using it or, some how broke the update mechanism. Ether scenario would be far less than optimal.

But, as it turns out, one of the things we inadvertently did differently for 1.2.1 was to provide a full update instead of a partial update to most of our users. (we usually provide partial updates for one release back and a full update for anything more than one release back. In this case we had a short lived 1.2 release so everyone that was still on 1.1.4 were getting full updates). So, instead of a couple hundred bytes we were sending 9 MB for Windows and Linux and 18MB for Macs. When downloading updates in the background, Flock (and Firefox) will download the update package 300k at a time every 10 minutes as to not diminish the browsing experience. For a full download this could take 8 hours! While downloading the update, Flock will NOT send further update pings, which makes sense, and if you use your browser for a couple hours before shutting down for the day, it will take several days for the full update to download. During that time, no update pings are sent explaining the dip we saw. Mystery solved and what we’ve done is to make a partial update for 1.1.4 to 1.2.1 users and turned the updates back on.

With all this distraction we haven’t been able to wrap getting the final localizations available. We should have the final localized versions available for 1.2.1 (IT, ca and hu) very soon.

That’s all for now but more coming soon!

Thx,
Mike

Blogged with the Flock Browser

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Localization, Service Availability, Status. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.