247673 - Review and change content of /start/index.html

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Daniel Wang]

www.mozilla.org/start/ and www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html have nearly
identitical content. We should merge the two and redirects /start. This will
also take care of bug 247672 (stop redirect).

This depends on bug 226063. Gerv, do we use /about/get-involved.html or
/get-involved.html ?

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

> www.mozilla.org/start/ and www.mozilla.org/get-involved.html have nearly
> identitical content. We should merge the two and redirects /start.

Currently, they happen to have similar content - however, that is not guaranteed
to be the case. The get-involved page is for people wanting to get involved. The
start page is the default home page for nightly releases of the browser. The two
are very different roles, and merging them would be a bad idea.

Gerv

Comment 2

[Daniel Wang]

Attachment: start-page redesign

> Currently, they happen to have similar content - however, that is not
> guaranteed to be the case.

Of course, we should consider all possibilities. This is an alternative design
to bad UA sniffing. gerv, can we reopen this bug?

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Daniel: you need to be more clear about what you want to do. I've read this bug
twice now and I still don't quite get it.

The current mozilla.org/start/ page is fine - it says all that people
downloading nightly builds need to know. Server-side UA-based redirecting for
released builds is also fine - see bug 248730. We are not going to stop using it
- so you can mark bug 247672 as WONTFIX.

Gerv
 

Comment 4

[Daniel Wang]

see bug 248664 comment 6:
> Lets not force prople to view it though.
> If they want to view the http://www.mozilla.org/start page lets let them not 
> redirect them to this mozilla.org/start/1.7 page.
> That is my only complaint.

The problem I have is with UA-sniffing. Currently we are doing both server-side
and client-side (javascript). I am totally against UA-based redirection.
Redirection should be "intentional", e.g. it's okay to redirect /start/1.8 to
/start or /start/1.7. We should reframe from after-thought redirection. Instead,
we should provide links and let the user choose where to go.

Another things I don't like is "This means that you've volunteered to become
part of the Mozilla testing community." We should not have any presumption of
what the user did (did s/he compiled the build?) and want to do (did s/he want
to do testing?). The user can be anyone (e.g. a reporter looking for what's new
info). The start/ page is the default page for nightlies, beta, alpha, release
candidates, and various past builds. Let's build a page that properly address
the variety of page visitors.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

The mozilla.org/start page is the default page for every build we ship except
for final releases. 

Every build we ship except for final releases is aimed exclusively at testers. 

Therefore, the mozilla.org/start/ page should be aimed exclusively at testers.

Gerv