…

On what grounds was it a mistake only in hindsight? AIUI (not that I was involved), everyone knew it wasn’t ready at the time, but it was decided to launch anyway.

What is it that’s been seen with hindsight that wasn’t seen at the time? Or is it just different people’s views of the same thing?

The site itself says that it’s “undergoing a design update and rewrite based on user input”, which doesn’t sound like the whole story to say the least…

Actually, we’ve frozen all CVS commits while we sort things out, and the review process will not remain as-is.

>“When its ready” is simply not justifiable with a site that’s
> already in production, you already have users depending on
> you, because the client does. If mozilla.org dropped the ball by
> not monitoring UMO more closely prior to now, and therefore
> has absolutely no clue how it works, then that needs to be
> stated. By leaving the status-quo, you’re also saying that
> Update 0.9 shouldn’t have been enabled either, which means
> why should anybody trust Mozilla Update if it’s been untrustable
> without anybody at mozilla.org noticing for 6+ months?

Our reputation for security is not simply “no holes here” its how aggressive and focused we are when a hole is found. The lack of oversight was unfortunate, but isn’t justification for continuing to expose ourselves to potential problems. That’s like saying “Wow, my wheels are pretty loose, but since I’ve been driving on this for months, I’m just going to take the chance.”

Its not ready. It wasn’t ready when it went live. Hindsight being 20/20, that was a mistake. We can’t change the past, we can only change the present.

“When its ready” is simply not justifiable with a site that’s already in production, you already have users depending on you, because the client does. If mozilla.org dropped the ball by not monitoring UMO more closely prior to now, and therefore has absolutely no clue how it works, then that needs to be stated. By leaving the status-quo, you’re also saying that Update 0.9 shouldn’t have been enabled either, which means why should anybody trust Mozilla Update if it’s been untrustable without anybody at mozilla.org noticing for 6+ months?

I can kind of see his point – it’s obviously not true that you can’t compromise on security, as the site was up and running with known security flaws for a couple of months.

I also don’t see much logic in shutting down to avoid potential future flaws. Applied to Firefox itself, would that not mean cancelling 1.1 if any flaws are found in Firefox 1.0?

There may be good reasons for this, but I’m not really getting a sense of what they are.

Surely a bigger risk in any case is the extensions themselves – they’re not (AIUI) audited, which is surely a bigger risk that someone slipping some dodgy HTML into a comment.

I hope the Foundation are devoting some resources to getting things going… there are no free rides