1211936 - Get data on how many installations successfully get blocklist updates

Status: RESOLVED INACTIVE

(Toolkit :: Add-ons Manager, defect)

Description

[Robert Kaiser]

From a release quality point of view, it's often very important for us to ship blocklist updates containing add-on, plugin, or gfx chipset/feature blocks that we dynamically apply based on the downloaded blocklists. This helps prevent crashes, functional breakage and similar quality issues.

The requests for those blocklist updates also form the ADI data we are using as a basis for crash rates, for example.

Given that those blocklist ping "ADI" numbers continuously decrease while I'm told that FHR-based "MAU" numbers are pretty stable, I start wondering if we have a rising population that cannot get their blocklists correctly updated, which would impair release quality (see above).

We know that some malware is intentionally interfering with connections to add-ons services (and the blocklists are served via a .addons.mozilla.org domain), so that could be one reason why we have issues there - but if so, we'd need to think of solutions for that.

Right now, we don't have good data on how big the problem is, so we should start there. Can we get a count of successful blocklist pings into the FHR/telemetry data (ideally the opt-out variant) so that we can find out what percentage of installations actually do send a ping on a given day to which they get a valid reply from the server, and how that rate changes over time?

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Blocklisting code is part of the addon manager component. Moving.