Open Bug 837300 Opened 11 years ago Updated 2 years ago

Notify upgrade problems to users on builds older than 15 weeks

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

defect
Points:
13

Tracking

()

People

(Reporter: mak, Unassigned)

References

Details

We have many users on older versions for which the upgrade system doesn't seem to work properly.
While fixing the upgrade system is the right solution, we could implement an interim solution, to help our users identify the problem.
Right now what happens is "nothing": the user is basically unaware of being on an old version until he ends up on a page saying "you are using an outdated browser, you'd better use OtherBrowser".
The result is that in many cases ,since the user is unaware of upgrades (happened to me already 4 times in the last month among friends) we don't even get a bug filed, and the user is lost about what to do.

I suggest once a week (maybe in nsBrowserGlue) to check if the update prefs are on automatic and the build date is < 15 weeks (3 versions old), if so show a notification bar:

"You are using an old version of Firefox, do you want to upgrade? | Yes | Remind me later | Never upgrade"

"Yes" would try to upgrade, just by opening the About dialog, this is simple and we can easily make this an hotfix to push down to versions up to FF10. I have verified remotely that just doing this solves most of the failed upgrades problems.

If at the next startup we still detect an old version, we may then notify: "Firefox detected a problem in the upgrade process, please [contact support]." or something similar.

If there's interest in this self-healing I may work on it.
this should clearly not happen on ESR.
(In reply to Marco Bonardo [:mak] from comment #0)
> I suggest once a week (maybe in nsBrowserGlue) to check if the update prefs
> are on automatic and the build date is < 15 weeks (3 versions old), if so
> show a notification bar:
> 
> "You are using an old version of Firefox, do you want to upgrade? | Yes |
> Remind me later | Never upgrade"

Re: the "Never upgrade" button, I think we should make it much harder and less direct to turn off automatic updates.
(In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] from comment #2)
> Re: the "Never upgrade" button, I think we should make it much harder and
> less direct to turn off automatic updates.

I think the intent was for that button to disable the notification, not actually disable updates. There are some valid cases where users can't/don't want to update, and badgering them incessantly in those cases can do more harm than good.
(In reply to :Gavin Sharp (use gavin@gavinsharp.com for email) from comment #3)
> (In reply to Jared Wein [:jaws] from comment #2)
> > Re: the "Never upgrade" button, I think we should make it much harder and
> > less direct to turn off automatic updates.
> 
> I think the intent was for that button to disable the notification, not
> actually disable updates. There are some valid cases where users can't/don't
> want to update, and badgering them incessantly in those cases can do more
> harm than good.

right, my intent was "stop notifying me, I didn't upgrade by choice", wrong choice of wording on my side
If possible, we should consider deploying this as an add-on hotfix to Firefox 10 and newer versions as well, much like bug 812573. This will address the use cases of users who are having issues (connection or otherwise) downloading updates, which bug 812573 does not.
In close to two weeks of availability for the hotfix developed in bug 812573, I'm seeing a 3-4% increase in users running the release version of Firefox. This is encouraging, but there still is a large number (~30%) running releases that are older than the most recent three releases.

I expect that the effect from bug 812573 will continue to show gains, but there is likely still more room for improvement.

Marco, will you be able to start working on this?
Flags: needinfo?(mak77)
I can take it for now, but I don't have an ETA, so if anyone thinks he may do this, he should feel free to steal this bug from me.
Assignee: nobody → mak77
Flags: needinfo?(mak77)
thanks, that's an interesting bug, though it won't cover all of the issues, for example I have knowledge of systems where the update system can see it has to update and tries to, but the update just keeps failing until you open the about dialog (that's why I was suggesting to open the about dialog to force an upgrade). I filed a bug about that issue but we didn't come to a viable solution, nor we found what's causing that behavior.
I think this is still very worth it, but I can't find the time to work on it. Just moving to the triage.
Would be interesting to check how many users we still have on old versions (> fx 10 and < fx 26) to see if this is still relevant.
Assignee: mak77 → nobody
Marco, we are tracking creating a hotfix to give users a full installer at bug 928173, and then using FHR to check for updates if Firefox hasn't updated in X weeks in bug 917469.

And sadly, yes this is still relevant. I have exact numbers I share privately, but the number of users on 10-26 is sadly extremely high.
Blocks: fxdesktopbacklog
No longer blocks: fxdesktoptriage
Whiteboard: p=0
No longer blocks: fxdesktopbacklog
Flags: firefox-backlog+
Whiteboard: p=0 → p=13
Points: --- → 13
Whiteboard: p=13
See Also: → 917469
Severity: normal → S3
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