652789 - Intercept links to old versions of Firefox and offer the latest version

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Webtools :: Bouncer, defect)

Description

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

According to https://metrics.mozilla.com/stats/firefox.shtml , old versions of Firefox have high daily download counts. The numbers are so high that all those downloads can't be the result of testers checking for regression windows on the release level or Web authors downloading old versions for testing. A more likely explanation is that these are potential new users who are following outdated links and end up downloading obsolete software.

I suggest redirecting links to non-latest releases of Firefox to a Web page that has text along the lines of:
"You followed a link to download an obsolete version of Firefox. You
should download the latest version (link) instead in order to stay safe online. If you really intended to download an old version for testing,
we have an archive of old releases (link)."

Obviously, the archive of old releases would need to be at a location that hasn't been linked to when a given release was the latest so that the archival location itself doesn't need the above message.

Comment 1

[Wesley W. Garland]

Before we do this, it might be worth checking the stats to see how many of those old-browser downloads come from Firefox users.

My gut tells me that there are probably way more non-Firefox users using outdated links, because once you have a copy of Firefox, it is pretty easy to upgrade.

If the stats indicate, for example, a lot GUI browsers which aren't Firefox, we might be able to accomplish this goal with a UA-sensitive redirect that throws up an intermediary page offering both the version they tried to download AND the latest version.

Actually, we could check http-referer instead of UA, this would still allow wget (etc) users access to the old versions. Something like

 - if no http referer, or http referer is mozilla.org, allow download
 - else display page with original link on it alongside the current browser link

This ^^^ would be a relatively straightforward httpd.conf hack if moz runs on Apache.

Of course, it doesn't help non-Firefox ftp:// users, but I don't think anything short of breaking the FTP site will.

Comment 2

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Do these stats exclude web spiders?

Comment 3

[William Durand [:willdurand]]

I don't think this is really actionable these days, closing.