Looking at the people who moved to FF3.5.0 yesterday:
- 65% downloaded the FF3.5.0 installer and installed from it
- 35% manually did Help->CheckForUpdates
That is a large percentage of people doing CheckForUpdates.
Considering this was our first time having Major Update available on release day, and considering there was no user prompting of this new major update ability, I found these percentages quite delightfully stunning.
While there wasn’t an official marketing push, it did get out on twitter that you could use the check for updates option. Might be worth checking how many tweets about it were posted as that’s a really great result.
Why would that be stunning? I suspect the only reason it’s that low is that the inability to get previous updates that way has trained a lot of users that it doesn’t work.
I’m very glad that it works right now. Makes a big difference in terms of feeling like Firefox is a solid and supported end-user product.
Hey John, the testing paid off over the quarter, so great props to the team on getting that working! Question, do you know if there were any indications of failed checkforupdates attempts and any AUS server issues? I’d be curious on the % of failed attempts if we were able to track that.
downloaded ff 3.5 .everything work,s fine until exit. cpu turns up to 105% .have to end the process at the manager. have switched to google.
[…] This is very similar to what we saw with the FF3.5.0 release. As far as I can tell, we did not gain 3million new users yesterday. My belief, without data to prove it, is that most/all of those 3million people were existing Firefox users who chose to do a download install, instead of doing CheckForUpdate. I guess there are cases where a Firefox user might want to do a fresh install, but I would have thought that most people would prefer the easier in-place upgrade of Help->CheckForUpdates. […]