[Desktop 12.04-Topic] Mozilla upgrade experience

[Chris Coulson]

Hi,

Note, I've already registered a placeholder blueprint for this [1].

We currently have a couple of problems with the Firefox and Thunderbird
upgrade experience, which users of Mozilla's update service don't
experience (ie, everybody on Windows, Mac, or anyone using mozilla.org
binaries on Linux).

1) A long standing issue we have is that upgrades totally break all
currently running instances of Firefox or Thunderbird until they are
restarted. This is made worse because we move the install location
around between updates, but pulling the rug from underneath any running
instance is probably never going to work reliably, even if the install
location doesn't change.

Note, this isn't just an issue with Mozilla applications - we just
notice it more because we update them a lot more frequently than
anything else in the archive. As another example, there was a Glade ->
GtkBuilder transition a few cycles ago, where upgrades between
distro-versions broke things such as the currently running instance of
gnome-panel [2] due to the glade files being replaced with gtkbuilder ui
files. I just wanted to point this out before people start blaming
Firefox that this is really a problem with how our package manager works...

Upstream are currently planning work around silent updates, and they
have a wiki page documenting how their update process will probably work
[3]. We might be able to learn some things from this.

2) We have no way of warning people if any of their addons might stop
working when we offer them an upgrade. People using upstream builds are
notified before an upgrade if any of their addons aren't compatible with
the update, and if there are no addon updates available to fix this.

Do we want to provide such functionality, bearing in mind:
- We haven't had that many bug reports yet from users complaining of
addons being incompatible after an upgrade, although there have been 1 or 2.
- As of the time of writing, 92% of addons on AMO are compatible with
the current Firefox beta (due to be released on November 8th). However,
approximately 75% of addons in use are not hosted on AMO [4].
- From Firefox 10 (Jan 31st, 2012), addons are going to default to being
compatible, with some exceptions (addons with binary components) [4].

Anyway, some things to think about.

Regards
Chris

[1] -
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/desktop-p-mozilla-upgrade-experience
[2] - https://launchpad.net/bugs/422568
[3] - https://wiki.mozilla.org/Background_Updates
[4] -
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Add-ons/Add-ons_Default_to_Compatible