953131 - EU ballot browser first run shows 404 landing page

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

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

Description

[Lars Viklund]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Install a Windows 7 Professional Swedish, run the browserchoice wizard shipping with the OS.

Download Firefox in that tool, from http://download-installer.cdn.mozilla.net/pub/firefox/releases/26.0/win32-EUballot/sv-SE/Firefox%20Setup%2026.0.exe

Launch Firefox, get a welcome page at http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/ which doesn't exist.


Actual results:

Welcome landing page after installation is a 404, note the 26.0beta in the URL.


Expected results:

Looking at the history in the browser reveals that it's trying to open the URL:
http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun/eu
which has a bogus redirect to
http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/

Comment 1

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Lars: Did you get the download from http://www.browserchoice.eu/BrowserChoice/browserchoice_en.htm ?

Comment 2

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Stephend: can you verify this bug? Try downloading Firefox 26 from comment 1 URL with new profile or no previous Firefox install and see what firstrun URL is opened. Try it with en-US.

I am seeing a lot of 404s from this from all locales all over the world.

Comment 3

[Chris More [:cmore]]

I've checked analytics and this has been happening all year. Any firstrun experience that calls www.mozilla.org/[locale]/firefox/[version]beta/firstrun/ throws a 404. If all the 404s are coming from the ./eu URL at the end of the browser preference for firstrun, I cannot see that in GA because 301 redirects don't pass along headers.

Comment 4

[Chris More [:cmore]]

The default Firefox preference has the following for firstrun:

pref("startup.homepage_welcome_url","https://www.mozilla.org/%LOCALE%/firefox/%VERSION%/firstrun/");

If the version includes anything bug numbers, i.e. beta, it will throw a 404 regardless of the /eu redirect.

Comment 5

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Actually, a correct. All non-en-US URLs like mentioned in comment 3 will 404. en-US will show an "Almost there" warning that your browser is out of data, which is probably even worse.

Comment 6

[Chris More [:cmore]]

I think we should modify the firstrun page to allow different URL patterns. 

Correct: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/27.0/firstrun/ (release)

Correct: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/27.0a1/firstrun/ (aurora)

Incorrect: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/27.0beta/firstrun/ (beta)

Comment 7

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

No need to verify, the bug is plain in the code:
http://mxr.mozilla.org/build/source/partner-repacks/partners/euballot/distribution/distribution.ini#16

This constructs the 
"http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun/eu" 
URL, which you can easily verify as having a broken redirect (as mentioned by the original reporter).

It would work without the /eu part tacked on. So the redirect is just broken.

Comment 8

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Just to make it absolutely clear:

The browser will navigate to:
http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun/eu

*OUR* webserver *incorrectly* redirects to:
http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/

(It's incorrect because this isn't beta, and why is the webserver guessing that anyway?)

This then gets a 404 because of what cmore mentions regarding version number formats. But that 404 is a (potentially) separate bug from the broken redirect - we shouldn't be redirecting to beta in the first place.

Comment 9

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

Downloading from the URL in comment 1, and after installation/launch, I get taken to both:

1) http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/
2) about:home

http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/ is a 404, yeah

Comment 10

[Chris More [:cmore]]

404: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/27.0beta/firstrun/

200k: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/27.0b/firstrun/

It seems that the firstrun urls are assuming [0-9]+\.[0-9]+(a|b)*[0-9]*

/[version].[sub version](optional a or b)[optional number]/firstrun/

We should change the logic to allow for b or beta, i.e. b[a-z]* or (b|beta)

Comment 11

[Chris More [:cmore]]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto (:gcp) from comment #7)
> No need to verify, the bug is plain in the code:
> http://mxr.mozilla.org/build/source/partner-repacks/partners/euballot/
> distribution/distribution.ini#16
> 
> This constructs the 
> "http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun/eu" 
> URL, which you can easily verify as having a broken redirect (as mentioned
> by the original reporter).
> 
> It would work without the /eu part tacked on. So the redirect is just broken.

Let me find the /eu redirect.

Comment 12

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

We (either Dev or Web QA) definitely need an automated, runs-against-webserver redirect test for this.  I'll create an issue.

Comment 13

[Chris More [:cmore]]

/eu redirect here:

http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.com/trunk/.htaccess?view=markup#l578

from bug 546525.

Comment 14

[Stephen Donner [:stephend] Not actively reading bugmail]

(In reply to Stephen Donner [:stephend] from comment #12)
> We (either Dev or Web QA) definitely need an automated,
> runs-against-webserver redirect test for this.  I'll create an issue.

https://github.com/mozilla/mcom-tests/issues/261

Comment 15

[Chris More [:cmore]]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto (:gcp) from comment #8)
> Just to make it absolutely clear:
> 
> The browser will navigate to:
> http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun/eu
> 
> *OUR* webserver *incorrectly* redirects to:
> http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/
> 
> (It's incorrect because this isn't beta, and why is the webserver guessing
> that anyway?)
> 
> This then gets a 404 because of what cmore mentions regarding version number
> formats. But that 404 is a (potentially) separate bug from the broken
> redirect - we shouldn't be redirecting to beta in the first place.

the /eu redirect seems to be working fine and I don't think is the issue here. I just install a fresh Firefox beta downloaded from mozilla.org (no eu partner repack). It opened the following firstrun page:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/ (incorrect almost there message)

The issue is that beta is part of the version number and the firstrun page is assuming it is either just a version number, a, or b and not spelled out as "beta".

Comment 16

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

>the /eu redirect seems to be working fine and I don't think is the issue here.

http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun/eu    => BROKEN
http://www.mozilla.org/sv-SE/firefox/26.0/firstrun       => WORKING

>I just install a fresh Firefox beta downloaded from mozilla.org (no eu partner repack). 
>It opened the following firstrun page: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/26.0beta/firstrun/

If you downloaded Firefox *beta*, how can it be Firefox 26? Beta is Firefox 27.

Comment 17

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Ok. There are two issues here:

1) /eu seems to be broken and redirecting to the wrong URL. Should be a fix in .htaccess.

2) bedrock needs to be modified to allow for the word "beta" in the version number. 

https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/blob/master/bedrock/firefox/__init__.py#L10

Currently, bedrock assumes only a|b and not beta in the version as seen above. The firstrun bedrock page is en-US only so it doesn't help much with the issue described in comment 0.

Comment 18

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

By the way, the /eu redirect ends up with the beta version number because of this rule:
http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.com/trunk/.htaccess?view=markup#l450

Comment 19

[Chris More [:cmore]]

(In reply to Gian-Carlo Pascutto (:gcp) from comment #18)
> By the way, the /eu redirect ends up with the beta version number because of
> this rule:
> http://viewvc.svn.mozilla.org/vc/projects/mozilla.com/trunk/.
> htaccess?view=markup#l450

Yeah, just looking at that now. thx. That .htaccess is going to be our demise....

Comment 20

[Josh Mize [:jgmize]]

:cmore do we actually need the rule that :gcp points out in comment #18? It seems to me like we should just remove that rule without modifying bedrock as described in part 2 of your comment #17.

Comment 21

[Paul [:pmac] McLanahan]

I agree with :jgmize. Looks like that rule is just no longer necessary and is now causing problems.

Comment 22

[Josh Mize [:jgmize]]

Attachment: Remove rapid release-channel-redirects

Comment 23

[Josh Mize [:jgmize]]

added r123802

Comment 24

[Paul [:pmac] McLanahan]

Merged to prod in r123807.

Comment 25

[Chris More [:cmore]]

jgmize/pmac: I will watch to see if we get much traffic to /[locale]/firefox/[version]beta/firstrun/ that throws either a 404 or loads the "you're almost there!" page after the revision pmac pushed 2 hours ago.

Comment 26

[Chris More [:cmore]]

Data on this bug looks great. Traffic went from 50k daily to less than 100. Awesome. 404's on mozilla.org are very low now.