Comments on: Major update to Firefox 3.6 (the day after)

By: sr pt

sr pt — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:41:11 +0000

I did not know of the Help>Check for Updates.

By: takeshi

takeshi — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:33:00 +0000

If you prefer in-place upgrade than downloading installer, why not remove “Get the World’s Best Browser” in Software Update dialog appearing after you click CheckForUpdates?
At least this should be “For more information…” in the last of this frame.

By: John

John — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:20:17 +0000

hi;

Wow; thanks for the *tons* of replies on that post.

Trevian,Martin: possible you were just a little too quick? We only enabled the updates around 9am PST / 10am MST / 5pm GMT. If you still have a computer on FF3.5.7, can you try again?

AUser,Joris,smaug: We make major update available at the same time as the downloadable installers. We’ve started doing this with the FF3.5.0 release, and with every release since then.

Gaurav,Tulapi,JimB,Matt,Peter Gasston,alanjstr: If you have more details on when you hit that “No updates available”, we’d love to hear. I’ve filed https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=543157 to track this. Any information you have would be great. Like when did you try? What city you were in at the time? What OS you were on? What version of Firefox you were running, trying to upgrade *from*?

By: MT

MT — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:04:34 +0000

It make sense to add an option to backup existing profile before installing update (and, in fact, whenever user wants to make backup). Moreover, it make sense to provide a way to create/select profiles with normal GUI rather than using sort of “secret” command line option -p to call the profile manager. Not all users know about profiles at all, and installing Fx from full installer may be just some desirable (but elusory) way to isolate (just in case) existing data and settings from new version.

By: Rasmussen

Rasmussen — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:05:19 +0000

Updating is slow. I prefer to Dowloadthemall the binary file. And while there is a way to pause updating, there is no way to cancel it. Been doing it from 3.5. Always like to have a bacup of an old version.

By: Mithgol the Webmaster

Mithgol the Webmaster — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 12:36:22 +0000

First of all, complete update means you won’t meet with bug 489522.

The update executable also can then be manually brought to environments with limited Internet access (intranets, expensive GPRS, etc.), where direct update is not desireable.

By: Ron

Ron — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:16:40 +0000

I think most people have no idea Help > Check for Updates exists, and assume the way to get the new version is to download it from the website.

If you want more people to use the built-in updater, then I think you’re going to have to do one (or both) of the following things:

1) Educate them. The Firefox download page needs to detect that they’re using the previous version of Firefox and suggest that they use Help > Check for Updates instead of downloading the entire thing. It should also tell them why (easier, faster, smaller download, etc.).

2) Push the update notification sooner, so fewer have a chance to download it manually. This may or may not be feasible or practical. Either way, I doubt it would have the same success rate as #1.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:39:18 +0000

Not that it gets to the central thrust of your post, but another disadvantage of not doing CheckForUpdates is that users don’t get notified if their extensions are incompatible beforehand.

By: Jigar shah

Jigar shah — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:42:16 +0000

Yes you can:) less crashes on FF I have also experienced similar issue with update. On linux distribution like fedora, new FF comes only when maintainer gets time. So i prefer o have custom version always. But it seems thats not the right way. bcos I see lots of crashes after update on Fedora12, almost everytime i close FF. Not sure why. But will try installing fresh. (and loosing lots of configurations and preferences for addons)

By: Jabba

Jabba — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 06:38:25 +0000

I think for me, there were three reasons why I manually downloaded instead of checking for updates:

1. Being in Germany and being subscribed to Planet Mozilla, I had about 30 blogs and Tweets that told me that Firefox would be released on the 21st, but nobody told me what time. So all day I would check the website until it was finally there in the evening.

2. I don’t think the average user knows that the supported upgrade path is. In the past, this has always been a little confusing. If I am using 2.0.xx and I check for updates, I’d get updated to 3.0.xx. If I’m using 3.0.xx and check for updates, I don’t get updated. When the new release came out, I wasn’t sure if that meant that 3.0.xx users would get updated to 3.5.xx and 3.6.xx would need to be a manual update, or what? So the easy thing is just to go download it manually, since I was checking the website all day for the new version anyway.

3. About half of the boxes I use run Linux, where the Check for Updates thing is grayed out and if you want to run the current version of anything, it needs to be a manual install. So I manually download it from the website and put it in /opt/, since the repositories have an older version.