1730110 - Update manual update URL

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: Application Update, enhancement, P3)

Description

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

While investigating an incident, I tried the manual update flow (which happens when update checks fail too many times). A prompt appears to manually update Firefox and it contains a "Download" button. Clicking on this button will open a new tab with the following URL: https://www.mozilla.org/<LOCALE>/firefox/.

This isn't great because it opens the link in FF and mozilla.org does not offer a very visible "Download FF" button (because we're already using FF).

This URL was introduced about 8 years ago in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=841221 and updated recently to include the locale: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1619145.

Having talked to the Bedrock team, it sounds like /firefox/new/ would be a much better URL (the page contains a big and very visible "Download" button).

In addition to that, I think it would make sense to include a query parameter to let Bedrock know that users visit the site because they clicked the "Download" button in the prompt (e.g., ?reason=manual-update).

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

I was just coming here to suggest the query parameter thing. We definitely want to be able to distinguish folks who hit that URL from various web routes from those who've clicked the in-product manual update notification. If someone's been hitting problems in the product to the point they get that prompt we want to get them going again as simply as possible, and not accidentally include them if we have some kind of experiment in-progress. Best for them, and we don't want people who might already be having trouble to accidentally end up part of the control group.

Comment 2

[Paul [:pmac] McLanahan]

Could we just start the download for them when they click that button and not require them to go to the website and click another button? I think if we really wanted to we could just construct the proper bouncer URL for their platform and language (e.g. https://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-latest-ssl&os=win64&lang=en-US) and start it.

Comment 3

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

That's much closer to automated updates, which are by definition failing at this point, than a "manual" download. If we send people to our site, and suddenly a bunch of people show up unexpectedly, we can try to diagnose the cause and may need to give them a special URL to a reachable site. That's why an identifying URL parameter is also a helpful part of this.

Comment 4

[Nick Rishel [:nrishel]]

Attachment: Bug 1730110 - Update the manual update url to point to the release build landing page. r=nalexander

Also add query paramaters to signify link was clicked due to manual update for all builds.

Comment 5

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/7111491510d4
Update the manual update url to point to the release build landing page. r=nalexander

Comment 6

[Norisz Fay [:noriszfay]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/7111491510d4