Bringing beta users on old versions of Firefox forward

[Alex Keybl]

I'd like to give everybody a heads up on a new effort we're pursuing to grow the Firefox beta population. Our main motivation is to ensure that we have the testing coverage necessary to surface new regressions as soon as possible in the beta period. We still have very large pockets of users on old betas that right now aren't contributing to testing.

The current hypothesis for why beta users haven't been updating is that some of their add-ons are being marked as incompatible with the latest versions of Firefox. With the advent of DTC (see [1]), we're now comfortable with helping these beta users move forward. We plan to offer automatic updates (see [2]) that advertise themselves as minor updates and therefore do not trigger an incompatible add-on check prior to installation.

You can follow along or voice any concerns in [3]. Thanks!

-Alex

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Add-ons/Add-ons_Default_to_Compatible
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Releases/Update_Terms#Automatic%20Update
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729654 - Update betas 4.0b7 through 9.0b6 to a 11.0bN with addon compatibility checks disabled

[Joe Drew]

On 2012-02-24 4:34 PM, Alex Keybl wrote:
> I'd like to give everybody a heads up on a new effort we're pursuing to grow the Firefox beta population. Our main motivation is to ensure that we have the testing coverage necessary to surface new regressions as soon as possible in the beta period. We still have very large pockets of users on old betas that right now aren't contributing to testing.

This is awesome.

For our own edification, how many users are currently on the latest 11
beta, and how many people are scattered across the various old betas?

joe

[Matt Brubeck]

On 02/24/2012 07:43 PM, Joe Drew wrote:
> For our own edification, how many users are currently on the latest 11
> beta, and how many people are scattered across the various old betas?

You can find most of that data here, though it excludes builds with
relatively few users:
https://metrics.mozilla.com/stats/firefox.shtml

Quick summary, for the builds listed in that table:

1,126K on the latest 11.0 beta
238K on older 11.0 betas
413K on 10.0 beta
226K on 9.0 beta
222K on 8.0 beta
98K on 7.0 beta
652K on older betas

[Matt Brubeck]

On 02/24/2012 08:18 PM, Matt Brubeck wrote:
> 1,126K on the latest 11.0 beta
> 238K on older 11.0 betas
> 413K on 10.0 beta
> 226K on 9.0 beta
> 222K on 8.0 beta
> 98K on 7.0 beta
> 652K on older betas

I should also note: of that last group, 354K are on 4.0 beta. (Not
surprising, because we grew the beta audience so much during the long
4.0 beta cycle.)