[qwerty_asdf]

I think it's mostly a tactic to mitigate, prevent, defend against denial of service, since the Mozilla user base is absolutely gigantic.

My suspicion is that it's essentially a "security through obscurity" tactic, so that the majority of users are left with no choice but the "smart" installer, which offers greater control for load balancing heavy duty traffic during peak download periods.

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5613152

[3825]

Sorry for the trouble you had to go through. If you have access to an FTP client, you can go to ftp://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/latest

or you can go to http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases... from a traditional web browser as well

Cheers!

[jeff18]

Mozilla uses Akamai as their CDN. As big as Mozilla is, a Firefox release probably is not even visible on a bandwidth graph.