576517 - Users of Linux distributions are directed to perform manual upgrades

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

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

Description

[Peter Oliver]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100622 Fedora/3.6.4-1.fc13 Firefox/3.6.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-GB; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100622 Fedora/3.6.4-1.fc13 Firefox/3.6.4

Users who receive Firefox from their Linux distribution are told to manually upgrade when they launch Firefox for the first time.  Are we sure this is good advice?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Upgrade to the latest version on Firefox that is available for Fedora 13 (this is 3.6.4 at present).
2. Wait until Firefox 3.6.6 is released, but not yet included in Fedora.
3. Start the browser, and find yourself at http://www.mozilla.com/en-GB/firefox/3.6.4/whatsnew/

Actual Results:  
You are told "For security reasons, we recommend downloading the latest and greatest version", and directed to manually download and install a tar.bz2 file.

Expected Results:  
The distribution is detected from the User-Agent header and, say, the user is directed to run their distribution's upgrade tool to check for available updates.

(Ideally the page would already know whether updates where available for the given distribution, but this is probably too much to ask).

Is this a job for Mozilla, or should distributors provide their own whatsnew pages?

Comment 1

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Closing old Mozilla.org website bugs due to them not being relevant to the new Python-based Bedrock system. Re-open if this is a critical bug and should be resolved on the new system too.

Comment 2

[Samuel Sidler (:ss)]

Peter, is this still true with Firefox 13?

Comment 3

[Peter Oliver]

No, looks good to me now.