869397 - Firefox Update for the unsupported OSs is inconsistent

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Release Engineering :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.0; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0

Updating older Firefox versions (<12) on Windows 2000 and on Mac OS X 10.5 is inconsistent. For e.g versions like Firefox 7 Beta, 8 Beta and 9 Beta are updated to Firefox 11 beta 5 and Firefox 10 beta is not updated at all ("Firefox is up to date" message is displayed when checking the about: dialog).

Steps to reproduce:
1. Install Firefox 7 beta 2
2. Launch Firefox, check for updates (Help menu -> About Firefox) and Apply the found updates.
3. Install Firefox 10 beta 3
4. Launch Firefox and check for updates.

Expected results:
In step 2 and 4: Firefox is updated to the last supported version which is Firefox 12.

Actual results:
In step 2: Firefox is updated to Firefox 11 beta 5.
In step 4: No updates are found. According with the About Firefox window - "Firefox is up to date"

Note:
Firefox 7 RC is updated to Firefox 12 but Firefox 10 RC is not updated (no updates are found).

Comment 1

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

This is handled by the servers and configured by releng.

Comment 2

[u279076]

Simona can you please provide AUS URLs for whichever builds fail to update to Firefox 12? You'll need to set app.update.log=true in about:config to see the URLs in error console.

Comment 3

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Attachment: AUS URLs for Firefox 7 beta 2

Comment 4

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

Attachment: AUS URLs for Firefox 10 beta

Comment 5

[u279076]

(In reply to Simona B [QA] from comment #4)
> Created attachment 746974 [details]
> AUS URLs for Firefox 10 beta

I think the failure here might be more to do with:
> *** AUS:SVC gOSVersion - error getting processor architecture.
> Exception: Error: couldn't find function symbol in library

Comment 6

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

I don't recall why betas for 9.0 and older go to 11.0b5 instead of 12.0b6, but at this point those users are vulnerable on 12.0b6 so changing that is WONTFIX.

Not sure about the 10.0 beta case. The STR is 10.0b3 but attachment 746974 [details] carries the buildID for 10.0b1. In any case I can update 10.0b3 to 22.0b2 on mac.

Comment 7

[Simona Badau, Desktop QA]

(In reply to Nick Thomas [:nthomas] from comment #6)
> Not sure about the 10.0 beta case. The STR is 10.0b3 but attachment 746974 [details]
> [details] carries the buildID for 10.0b1. In any case I can update 10.0b3 to
> 22.0b2 on mac.

Have you tried to update Firefox on Mac OS X 10.5 or on a newer version? 
On my Mac OS X 10.5 none of the beta's versions can be updated (10b1, 10b2, 10b3, 10b4, 10b5, 10b6).

Comment 8

[Nick Thomas [:nthomas] (UTC+12)]

Ah, right. The last version we supported Mac 10.5 was Firefox 16.0 or 16.0b6. We have about 10K beta users on 10.5, and more than half of those are already on a  16.0 beta. Given we're at 22.0b2 already a special update path to 16.0 isn't very compelling.

The current update server doesn't make it easy to manage deprecation, but we're working on a new one which will make this is easier. We would just point at the last compatible build.