Upgrade, Sidegrade, Downgrade policy
Basil Hashem
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/Distro_Requirements
I've taken a crack at outlining what the behavior of Firefox should be
when upgrading users, or installing new versions, etc...
Take a look at:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/UpgradePolicy
Feedback is appreciated
--
Basil Hashem
ba...@mozilla.com
Benjamin Smedberg
> Take a look at: http://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox3/UpgradePolicy
> * Once a user has run Firefox, we should do our best to preserve default
> settings as well as personalized settings
I think this is a bad general policy. We should preserve personalized
settings in all cases, but there are many cases where we shold not preserve
default settings across major updates or reinstalls. In particular, imagine
the following sequence:
1) A user gets Firefox Yahoo edition from the yahoo website.
2) They try it, but quickly realize that it doesn't have the default home
page they are used to (just a simple search box)
3) They uninstall it
4) They get Firefox from getfirefox.com and install it
Since the user has not customized their home page (and I imagine that many
people don't know they *can* customize their home page), I believe the user
expectation is that they would get a "stock Firefox", with the standard
homepage.
Also, for "non-partner" builds, I would expect that mozilla should be able
to change the default homepage in major releases. Imagine, for example, that
in Firefox 3 we decided to make the default home page a local page which
allows the user to search their history, bookmarks, and the web. When users
who have not set a custom homepage upgrade to Firefox 3, I would expect they
want to have this new and improved page. We should treat the home page as
part of the product, not as a setting which changes over time.
The same thing goes for various "values in Firefox preferences". In
particular, we have tweaked which operations websites are allowed to perform
by default over time (open windows with no statusbar, or no URLbar, or...).
These security settings provide reasonable defaults for our users, and we
should keep those defaults reasonable over time, unless the user has chosen
an explicit non-default setting.
The document also says "installed dictionaries" may not be preserved. What
does this mean? We do preserve dictionaries which are installed in the
profile, and I can't think of any reason we wouldn't want to continue doing
this.
Downgrade is a hard problem. Unless we are commited to actually doing QA of
downgrade, we should not support install-on-top downgrade at all, and we
should explicitly warn or prevent downgrade in the Windows installer. It is
probably safer to support downgrade when the user uninstalls the previous
version before installing the new version.
--BDS