830615 - Add to about:support: whether or not product was downloaded from package manager

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Chris Ilias [:cilias]]

I don't know if this is possible, but it would be useful. Sometimes, when helping a Linux user, it's important to know if they got Firefox from Mozilla or from their distro. For instance, I don't think about:crashes is available if you got Firefox from your distro.

If something could be added to about:support that will tell us whether or not they got it from their distro, that would be helpful.

Comment 1

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

It would be fairly straightforward to test the presence of crash reporting and use that as a basis. I don't know how accurate that is for what you want here, you probably know better than me. The only alternatives that spring to mind involve all the distros adding some distribution prefs that we could use.

Comment 2

[jhesling]

Note, related sumo forum thread started by Chris https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/

I believe with at least some Distros such as Ubuntu the User Agent String differs from the equivalent Mozilla UAS, could that help in some cases? The Ubuntu distro versions tend to come with default modifications, so again for support purposes it is good to know whether it is the Canonical version, as may be expected in a distro, or the Mozilla version.

Comment 3

[jhesling]

(In reply to jhesling from comment #2)
> Note, related sumo forum thread started by Chris
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/
> 
Sorry should have linked direct to https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/708883

Comment 4

[Sebastian Hengst [:aryx] (needinfo me if it's about an intermittent or backout)]

Do distros change app.update.url (default value: https://aus3.mozilla.org/update/3/%PRODUCT%/%VERSION%/%BUILD_ID%/%BUILD_TARGET%/%LOCALE%/%CHANNEL%/%OS_VERSION%/%DISTRIBUTION%/%DISTRIBUTION_VERSION%/update.xml ) or do they alter other update checking code?