540022 - Either mozilla.com or mozilla.org should have links to nightly builds

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

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

Description

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

The old mozilla.org page had a link to http://www.mozilla.org/developer/, but nowadays that link is gone, it seems.
It is hard for even me to find the link to nightlies. Have to use the search field
in the mozilla.org.

If we want to have nightly testers, providing the link to right binaries is a must.

Comment 1

[chris hofmann]

home page and many of the "getting involved" pages such as for QA and localization.   community marketing pages would be another good place.  to be involved in marketing planning and activities the best way is to stay abreast of development effort and think about how we might tell users about them, and participate in the creation and testing of the features.

Comment 2

[John Slater]

Copying David Boswell, who will know about possible ways to link on mozilla.org.

Also, btw, for anyone interested in the nightlies site I'd recommend following this bug: 524881

Comment 3

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

Since this is pretty important bug, IMO, could we find some to assign this to?
I don't know who is managing m.com.

David, perhaps you could make changes to mozilla.org?

Comment 4

[John Slater]

I manage mozilla.com, but this feels like a mozilla.org link to me. Would like David to weigh in on that, though.

Comment 5

[David Boswell]

For mozilla.org, my thoughts are to have a link to nightly.mozilla.org in the sidebar of the Projects page.  Maybe a visual promo like the Namoroka link that says something like 'Latest developer builds -- nightly.mozilla.org'.  

We could also redirect traffic from http://www.mozilla.org/developer/ to nightly.mozilla.org since it seems like the nightly links were the most relevant content on that page.  I'd like Sheppy and/or Reed to weigh in on that though.

If anyone has ideas for other places to put a link, let me know.

Comment 6

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

The old link to http://www.mozilla.org/developer/ is basically replaced with a link to https://developer.mozilla.org/ . MDC seems like the best place to start linking to nightlies IMO.

I think it's dangerous to link to nightly builds on webpages that we expect end-users to visit, such as www.mozilla.com.

Comment 7

[David Boswell]

MDC does sound like another good place for a link.  Sheppy owns MDC as well as the mozilla.org/developer page (which isn't redirecting anywhere yet) so let's see what he says about this.

Comment 8

[chris hofmann]

The links on http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

under "Take the next version of Firefox for a test drive."

that point at
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

have been very helpful in rebuilding our beta test community.  For the last couple of years I think we might have over rotated on burying beta and RCs download links on the wiki, devmo, and other obscure sites that don't get nearly the traffic of mozilla.org and mozilla.com

I think Olli's suggestion is that we need to activate some of these higher traffic sites to build our nightly, alpha, and beta populations.  That's a key to use delivering high quality releases.   I think the current messaging on mozilla.com also addresses cilias concern that we don't want novice users mistakenly downloading test software.   We just need to make the download link less prominent and explain what to expect out of the "test drive."

Novice users should steer clear of test driving experimental software, and be attracted to the big download link buttons.

Comment 9

[John Slater]

I agree with chofmann's general point in comment #8 that building up our beta community is key, and I definitely advocate putting beta links in high profile places when we feel like they're ready for prime time (like we've done for 3.6).

But, nightlies are a different thing altogether, and I don't see a huge amount of benefit in putting them on mozilla.com for the exact reason cilias was saying in comment #6.

The primary function of mozilla.com is to get people to download the GA version of Firefox...and since we have strong community and developer-focused sites like mozilla.org and MDC, I think we should keep the nightlies there. (but promote them more than they're promoted now)

Comment 10

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

(In reply to comment #8)
> I think Olli's suggestion is that we need to activate some of these higher
> traffic sites to build our nightly, alpha, and beta populations.
Yes, although the original reason for this bug was that even I couldn't
easily find the link to nightly builds. (I usually use my own builds)

Comment 11

[Eric Shepherd [:sheppy]]

I agree; we should make it easy to find nightlies, but only on MDC. I'll add that to the list of things to consider when we redesign the main page; that process is in work already.

Comment 12

[David Boswell]

In terms of improving the information about testing and developing Firefox and making better use of site traffic, see the proposal in bug 350989 about updating the Firefox project page on mozilla.org.  And there is a link to nightly.mozilla.org on there.

Comment 13

[chris hofmann]

mozilla.com had some prominent placement for the channel pages a while back and that helped to build aurora and beta users in the last stages of firefox 4 and early stages of rapid release.

now the .com channel pages redirect to
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/ 
and the new .org home page makes finding aurora and beta difficult.

we definitely could use some more help building aurora and beta users again. aurora is down to 110k and beta is down to 1.4 million with fx8 and fx9.  these numbers are too low to give us a good info on if we are hitting our stability and compatibility targets.   the bug the david mentioned above is marked WFM.

what are next steps on this one?

Comment 14

[Andrei [:sancus]]

I don't think this bug is relevant anymore. The main firefox page on mozilla.org now links to Beta and Aurora in the Releases menu, and that seems sufficient. Linking to nightly.mozilla.org on the primary end-user Firefox pages is probably not a good idea.