Iceweasel upgrade homepage, a week later

When users upgrade Firefox, they are shown a special web page after restart. As this was obviously very Firefox oriented, this was disabled in Iceweasel. Until a week ago.

A week ago, I created a (quite raw) web page that users of Iceweasel 3.5.6-2 would see after they install or upgrade. The idea behind this page was suggested by Moritz Muehlenhoff during my BoF at DebConf 9, and consisted of displaying a call for help message in a splash screen. What most looked like this in Iceweasel is the Firefox feature mentioned above. I unfortunately wasn't able to implement it until now.

So, a week after these pages were put online and Iceweasel 3.5.6-2 was uploaded, even though I can't say it's a huge success, it at least led to some movement: More than 12000 users (still growing) saw the pages, out of which almost 1800 (roughly 15%) followed the link for a new logo. While there was no contribution for a new logo yet, there has already been several translations contributions for the web pages, in german, spanish and italian. Next iceweasel upload will consequently send users to a localized version of the web page when it exists.

The server logs also allow to have some figures on the usage of localized versions of Iceweasel, but as this is based on user agent strings, it is not totally accurate, though somehow interesting:

  1. english: 58.3%
  2. german: 15.2%
  3. french: 7.9%
  4. spanish: 3.8%
  5. italian: 2.7%
  6. polish: 2.5%
  7. japanese: 2.2%
  8. russian: 2.1%
  9. portuguese: 1%
  10. czech: 0.6%

Another interesting figure is that apparently 2.4% of users haven't upgraded xulrunner-1.9.1 and are not using version 1.9.1.6 with their Iceweasel 3.5.6. I'm afraid of what this can mean for stable security updates, although, as being security updates, they may be followed better.

Somewhere around 7% of users have, at some point, changed their user agent string to include Firefox in it, because web sites suck. This is a very interesting figure because despite that being quite significant, we haven't got that many complaints (I'm not saying there weren't, but I would have expected more, considering the amount of users involved). Fortunately, this was changed recently, so all these users could reset their user agent string.

And last but not least, except amd64 and x86 users, we saw 14 powerpc users and 7 arm users.

2010-02-10 13:00:44+0900

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5 Responses to “Iceweasel upgrade homepage, a week later”

  1. Gal Says:

    Hi Mike,

    Do you have plans to upload version 3.6 of Iceweasel?
    I see that there are 2 open bugs for it:
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=556177
    http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=567684

    But no comment if you’re planning or not planning to upgrade. either way it will be great if you can write some words about it.

    Thanks,
    Gal

  2. glandium Says:

    Gal: hint in the first paragraph of http://glandium.org/blog/?p=863

  3. Gal Says:

    Great!!
    Thanks for building this package and for the time contribution to the Debian project.

  4. Ian Says:

    What’s wrong with the current logo?

  5. Gabriel Says:

    I guess there is a problem of encoding in the homepages. The HTML files are in UTF-8 (at least in french, german and italian) but the files ar served without encoding information and are thus served as ISO-8859-1.
    Don’t know it a bug should be filled for this.

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