282314 - Using Updater to accurately count downloads at Spreadfirefox.com

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ben Clark]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041110 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041110 Firefox/1.0

Currently Spreafirefox.com uses each download of Firefox to get its download
count, this is extremely unaccurate as many people put one download on disk and
use it for multiple installations, also, many people have set up unofficial
mirrors and are thus downloads from there are not counted.

I suggest that during installation, or on Update Check, Firefox connects to a
remote server to register the vote.

<Possible Method>
1. A SHA1 hash is created from the users HD data, or randomly generated.
2. Firefox connects to a remote server
3. The hash is added to database, and a download (hereafter Installation) counted.
4. Firefox keeps the hash in registry-/etc/ so a installation can only be
counted more than once per machine if the computer is formatted, or the hash
tampered with.

Reproducible: Always



Expected Results:  
See Above

Comment 1

[Chris Blore]

The problems created by this are twofold:

1. The server resources required when a new update is released would be enormous
and could better be diverted to actually facilitating the downloads themselves.

2. People aren't very keen on having their machines trackable via a remote
machine and therefore it may not go down very well, no matter how that
information is stored or used.

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

we're not that concerned about counting users.