When some major online event occurs, the website concerned tends to get very popular very fast. This tsunami of traffic is usually called a Slashdotting, after the granddaddy of tech news sites which originally created the effect. But these days, one can also get Dugg or Reddited – or even all three at once.

To mitigate this problem for Firefox releases, we have a sophisticated mirror system, which spreads copies onto many servers around the world whose administrators have volunteered to help us. It makes sure that everyone gets the most appropriate version – for their operating system, in their language, from a working server geographically nearby. So no one's machine is overloaded, and everyone is happy.

This all works fine as long as people download Firefox through the website, which is only updated when we actually announce the release to the world. However, it takes several hours to distribute the download to all the servers in the network, and because everyone knows the release date, some people have an unfortunate desire to jump the gun, and obsessively watch individual machines. And as soon as the new directory appears and files are put in it, they run off to boost their karma on the major traffic-driving sites by writing premature "Firefox has been released!" stories.

Of course, because the mirroring system isn't yet working, they link directly to a particular build for a particular operating system and language on a particular server. So, not only does that server melt (which is intensely irritating to its owner) but those people who do get through often get an inappropriate version. Both they and we get upset.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, likes surprising people. His keynotes at the Macworld Conference are eagerly anticipated, with rumour sites eager to predict what new product he might announce (and getting sued for it too). He glories in the moment of whisking off the satin cover to reveal Apple's latest shiny creation.

In marked contrast, the feature list for Firefox 2 is also public, and has been since it was written. Much of the marketing strategy is developed on public mailing lists, wikis and websites. Anyone who wants to can download preview releases or even nightly builds. Nothing we ship and little we say is a surprise.

As pioneers of community marketing and open development, we can hardly complain about this, but it does make it harder to generate excitement about features that many geeks and reporters have been using for ages. Spell-checking is one such; it's been in our alpha and beta releases for the past six months. It's easy to forget that most of the world is seeing it for the first time.

The last piece of openness which causes headaches relates to security patches. Security bugs are one of the few non-public things about the Mozilla project – access to them is restricted to a “security group” of known and trusted hackers. However, the fixes which are developed in private need testing, and that means making them part of the public code.

Recently, we became aware of a program which watches the changes made to the Mozilla code, finds the associated bug for each, and flags up those changes associated with a private bug (i.e. a security one). This makes it very easy to locate which fixes are security fixes, examine the code change, and work out what the problem might be and how to exploit it.

There's no good answer to this one. Breaking the links between the patches and the bug harms the development process. Disguising security fixes among other changes is bad practice. And we can't just ship binary versions for testing – the licence doesn't permit it, for good reasons. So far, we've just had to grin and bear it.

In the grand scheme of things, all of these troubles are minor compared to the massive advantages of being open. But I just thought I'd note that the open life isn't perfect.

Gervase Markham works for the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting choice and innovation on the Internet. His blog is Hacking For Christ

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