Comments on: A User’s Experience when Downloading Firefox

By: darkhole

darkhole — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:15:32 +0000

Maybe, you can simply change the Installer Icon.
It’s very generic, and many people don’t know that tis is an installer.
I’m using Linux, and don’t have this problem. But a icon file very personal to Firefox is a good decision.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 17:52:47 +0000

Agree with Dave, instead of a download then install procedure, a one click download/install like Google’s chrome is a far better, quicker and easier solution for the user.

By: Ted Mielczarek

Ted Mielczarek — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:48:10 +0000

I wonder if it’s worth creating a simple script that could try downloading the installer and email a warning somewhere if it failed (noting the mirror that it was downloading from). Then we could get this script running on a regular basis, and see if there’s any sense to the data. Are certain mirrors failing more often? From certain ISPs?

By: Robert Strong

Robert Strong — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:43:38 +0000

Just a small nit: the number possible for the dropoff number for the installer is actually the total minus the number of incomplete downloads which makes the installer dropoff rate closer to 18%

By: Matthew Holloway

Matthew Holloway — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:06:13 +0000

My parents had a slow dialup connection and I couldn’t grab Firefox 3 on that machine. I ended up bringing the files over on a USB drive.

Downloading OpenOffice.org was even more problematic.

By: kkovash

kkovash — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:38:30 +0000

Nick,

Good question! We did try to incorporate this user experience into our findings. From the mirror data, we’re able to consider download requests where the user doesn’t get the full data. Specifically, we looked at the number of builds worth of bytes we shipped under this scenario, which means that we pushed enough data equivalent to X many builds. These “effective downloads” represent an upper bound number of downloads for users retrying, so we incorporated a certain percentage into the numbers presented above.

Ken

By: nthomas

nthomas — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:52:03 +0000

Does the analysis of the d/l failure rate include people who retry ? I would expect some proportion would try again in the case of a transmission error or server timeout.

By: Ted Mielczarek

Ted Mielczarek — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 16:23:32 +0000

Dave:

Note that Google cheats here, because they install a “Google Update” plugin with any of their Google desktop software, which has the side-effect of letting them do 1-click installs from Firefox. (Personally this scares the shit out of me.)

By: bc

bc — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 14:44:44 +0000

Dan has a great point especially on Mac where the download size is 17M due to the universal builds. It would take a dialup user an hour or more to download a Mac build.

By: Staś Małolepszy

Staś Małolepszy — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:18:31 +0000

Would it be possible for the .exe to be a small (less than 1 MB) downloader of the real installer? Personally I’m not a fan of this solution (mostly because rarely anyone bothers to give the exact information on the download size), but maybe it is something that we could test?

This is how I see it:

1. The user clicks “Download” on mozilla.com. The download box has the information about the download size: “Download Firefox – Free 3.0.5 for Windows, English (US) (300KB now, 7MB later)

2. The 300KB downloader is saved on the user’s computer. The small size of the downloader minimizes the risk of interrupting the download or getting an incomplete file.

3. The downloader is run from user’s computer (either automatically after the download finishes, or manually by the user — for this reason it should have an icon with the Firefox logo, but still visually different from the icon we use for the browser).

4. The downloader downloads the real installer (~7MB). It has the ability to pause and resume download.

5. Once the real installer is downloaded, the downloader closes and the installer opens, enabling the user to continue with the installation.

A possible problem is that after the installation, there are three icons on the user’s desktop: the downloader, the installer and the Firefox shortcut.