1372650 - Check at start minimum system-requirements and give a popup if not comply

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Tobias B. Besemer [:BesTo] (QA)]

Think, Firefox should check at start the minimum system-requirements and give a popup (at least in Windows) if the system do not comply them.

Since FF52.x was the last version with support for older hardware and OSes (e.g. WinXP, Vista), and FF version >=53.x dropped a lot of support, FF >=53 should prevent users from trying to run it and generate this way unnecessary crash-reports.

If a system-requirement don't match, there should come up a msg like "Firefox needs at least xxxMB memory to start!".

IMHO there should be also a msg like "Please use Firefox Version 52.x with your Hardware/OS.".

Comment 1

[Tobias B. Besemer [:BesTo] (QA)]

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]: Because users can get an installation of FF that don't start anymore.

Comment 2

[Gerry Chang [:gchang]]

Track 54- as 54 is released and this will be a new feature for 54. We won't take this in 54.

Comment 3

[Liz Henry (:lizzard)]

Matt, is this something that we might check on when updating?

Comment 4

[Molly Howell (she/her) (mostly inactive)]

It's pretty hard for us to end up in a situation where Firefox is trying to run on a system that does not meet its requirements.

First, we have these kinds of checks in the Windows installer, which is how the great majority of users get Firefox initially.

On macOS, I believe what happens is that the application declares what OS version it requires, and unsupported OS's refuse to run the app and generate their own error message.

On updates, when requirements change (which is uncommon), what we do is make sure the value that's changing is included in the request the client sends to check for updates (for example, see bug 1366917, where the RAM amount was added). Then on the server side (Balrog) the requirements are validated and when any are not met, the response sent to the client is that no updates are available.

What we don't really have that this bug is asking for is a way to tell the user that an update request was stopped because a specific requirement isn't met. We could incorporate this into the Firefox update UI, but I suspect the Balrog change required would be difficult (although I don't actually work on that system).

Comment 5

[Tobias B. Besemer [:BesTo] (QA)]

(In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #4)
> What we don't really have that this bug is asking for is a way to tell the
> user that an update request was stopped because a specific requirement isn't
> met. We could incorporate this into the Firefox update UI, but I suspect the
> Balrog change required would be difficult (although I don't actually work on
> that system).

The bug was normally about a check & popup when e.g. the EXE gets started on Windows...
...but I didn't knew about the check in the installer...
...but a USB-Install (portable version) will have the same problem...
...and your suggestions sounds also really good!

Comment 6

[Trevor Skywalker]

(Bug 1372650)
(In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #4)
> It's pretty hard for us to end up in a situation where Firefox is trying to
> run on a system that does not meet its requirements.

The currently "recommended" system requirements for a desktop computer running FF 54.0 are 512MB of RAM. 

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/54.0/system-requirements/

And yet [:gsvelto] states that systems running 1GB - 2GB of RAM are considered "older machines" (Bug 1373958 Comment #8).

Do the minimum or recommended system requirements need to be updated/raised? 

Is 512MB of RAM inadequate for a desktop machine in 2017?

Comment 7

[Trevor Skywalker]

(Bug 1373958 Comment #8)
(In reply to Gabriele Svelto [:gsvelto] from comment #8)
> So I've
> done a bit of research and as it turns out ZwCreateUserProcess is one of the
> kernel functions that anti-viruses usually hook to scan executables being
> launched. Some crash reports do have an AV add-on but others don't though I
> cannot tell if the system is using an AV w/o a specific Firefox add-on. One
> thing that stands out is that they all seem to come from older machines.
> I've looked at a dozen reports and most of them had either 1 or 2 GiB of
> memory.
> 
> Based on that I'd speculate that this is the AV being very slow (on older
> HD-based machines with little RAM) when encountering the pingsender
> executable for the first time.

Do systems running an antivirus program require higher minimum or recommended system requirements (like RAM) to also run Firefox than systems without an antivirus program?

Comment 8

[Tobias B. Besemer [:BesTo] (QA)]

(In reply to skywalker333 from comment #6)
> (In reply to Matt Howell [:mhowell] from comment #4)
> > It's pretty hard for us to end up in a situation where Firefox is trying to
> > run on a system that does not meet its requirements.
> https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/54.0/system-requirements/
> Do the minimum or recommended system requirements need to be updated/raised? 

I'm also missing Windows 8.1 as supported OS and wondering that just 200MB free HD-Space will be enough...

Comment 9

[Tobias B. Besemer [:BesTo] (QA)]

And I'm also missing the minimum OS-Requirements for "Windows Home Server" and "Windows Server" and ask myself now, if the update-channel and the installer handle it...

"Windows Server 2003" extended support ended on July 14, 2015...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/windows-server-2003

So, up-to-date servers will be:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Windows Home Server 2007
- Microsoft Windows Home Server 2011
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2
- Microsoft Windows Server 2016
From: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows_Server