1096514 - FIrefox 33.0.3 tells me there's an update to 33.1 but the download link says I have the latest

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 939470

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Steve Chessin]

Attachment: Congrats.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:33.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/33.0
Build ID: 20141105223254

Steps to reproduce:

I clicked on the "Tell me more" link in the pop-up that notified me of the update. That took me to here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/33.1/releasenotes/
On that page I clicked on the download link
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
which took me to here:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
which says "Congrats! You’re using the latest version of Firefox"


Actual results:

I got a page that said I had the latest version of Firefox. (See attachment.)


Expected results:

I should have been taken to a page that would have allowed me to download the latest (33.1) version of Firefox.

Comment 1

[Steve Chessin]

Attachment: The Release Notes page, showing the location of the Downloads link I clicked on.

Comment 2

[Steve Chessin]

Attachment: UpdateAvailable.png The Update Available pop-up, showing the link I clicked on

Comment 3

[Chris More [:cmore]]

This is expected behavior even though it is not ideal for some use-cases. This is going to be improved via bug 988725.

Why it is expected behavior now?

Because the Firefox's user agent only includes the major version and it is zero for all minor version. So, Firefox 33.1 and Firefox 33.0.3 both appear as 33.0 within the user agent. The user agent is how we vary the content on mozilla.org and how we perform intelligent redirects. What is happening is that the browser itself knows about major and minor versions and it includes links to mozilla.org. When you go to the download page, the browser's user agent is 33.0 regardless if you are running 33.03 or 33.1 thus the website thinks you are on the latest version. We remove the download button for people on the latest major version because lots of people re-download Firefox even though they are on the latest version because they think it will solve some performance problem. Paving over Firefox with the same version doesn't solve performance problems, thus we remove the download button as the main call to action.

There is a link on the page that says "download a fresh copy" and that points to the /firefox/all/ page where people can manually download if they really feel they need to. Silent updates are included in Firefox, so most users never really need to manually download. Going to the "About Firefox" (
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/update-firefox-latest-version) menu will also allow you to update Firefox without having to go to www.mozilla.org.

Comment 4

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Actually, determining the full version number can be done via bug 1065525.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Jennifer Bertsch [:jbertsch] from comment #5)
> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1065525 ***

Sorry, why is this a dupe? Presumably we'd still need to implement this on the relevant page, which wasn't done in bug 1065525...

Comment 7

[Steve Chessin]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #3)

> There is a link on the page that says "download a fresh copy" and that
> points to the /firefox/all/ page where people can manually download if they
> really feel they need to.

And that's what I did.

> Silent updates are included in Firefox, so most
> users never really need to manually download. Going to the "About Firefox" (
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/update-firefox-latest-version) menu
> will also allow you to update Firefox without having to go to
> www.mozilla.org.

I don't like to let Firefox silently update itself because that makes it difficult to go back to a previous version. I download the dmg (keeping the five most recent), open it, copy the Firefox.app it contains to a temporary location, rename it by adding the version number (for example, Firefox.33.0.3.app), move it to the Applications directory (keeping the four most recent), then plant it in the dock (keeping the three most recent).

Granted I'm not your normal user, but it's still jarring to be told by your right hand that I have the latest when your left hand has told me I don't. And given the number of similar bugs opened on this issue (I easily found three: 789731, 983936, 1066436), I'm not the only one who finds it jarring. (It exposes your internal (dis)organization to me when what I want is a seamless experience.)

One workaround would be to add some text, or a "Did we tell you you didn't have the latest and you find yourself here?" link to some text, that explains why this happens and what to do about it, similarly to the way you told people how to work around the Apple whitelisting problem.

Comment 8

[Chris More [:cmore]]

I agree it is a jarring experience and you are not alone. It is challenging from the web development side to provide useful information to the visitor when all we know is the major version. You can read the purposeful change by the Firefox team in bug 728831 over 2 years ago.

You're right, there have been other bugs filed on this very topic. Bug 939470 is currently in the queue to be worked on.

Comment 9

[Steve Chessin]

(In reply to Chris More [:cmore] from comment #8)
> I agree it is a jarring experience and you are not alone. It is challenging
> from the web development side to provide useful information to the visitor
> when all we know is the major version. You can read the purposeful change by
> the Firefox team in bug 728831 over 2 years ago.

I understand the reason for the change, but the side-effects of it were apparently not anticipated.

> You're right, there have been other bugs filed on this very topic. Bug
> 939470 is currently in the queue to be worked on.

And I'm sure that Kohei will eventually fix it. But in the mean time you (the generic "you", as in whoever owns the text on the https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ page) could implement the workaround I suggested in Comment 7, just as a workaround was eventually implemented for the Apple whitelist problem (see Bug 1072538). That would turn a negative experience into a positive one. Instead of a "What the @#$%?" reaction, I'd see (a) a recognition of the problem and (b) a simple workaround.

Comment 10

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Wrong duplicate bug, it should be bug 939470.

Comment 11

[Chris More [:cmore]]

I've needinfo kohei on bug 939470. I would like to focus on getting this resolved. It hasn't been much of an issue before, but with so many non-major releases (dot releases) in the past few months, this bug has been very confusing to lots of people. It was only since Firefox 29 that any of this was possible because we had no way of www.mozilla.org talking to Firefox and finding out the exact version number.