Silent Update whatsnew

Summary

• With Silent Update, the What's New page itself is less relevant to the user given we want to be "silent". However, there is a need for Product Marketing/Engagement to communicate to our users on a regular basis and the purpose of this feature page is to define those requirements.
• The server side work is being developed for this release, while the client side work to provide this functionality is available with Firefox 4 and above.

What will be tested

• A test path from the builds on the release channel to 8.0b4 with the special sauce in the snippets (ie actions=silent).
• What we want to check is that
  • the update is found and works with all these new attributes being set
  • the what's new page isn't shown after restart
• The release builds which can be used to test the updates (4.0, 4.0.1, 5.0, 5.0.1, 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 7.0, 7.0.1) can be found here

Use case

• (If) The update path is available:
  • Starting with a release builds: 4.0, 4.0.1, 5.0, 5.0.1, 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, 7.0, 7.0.1
  • Use the releasetest channel
  • You will end up on 8.0b4 (buildID is 20111019081014; or load about:buildconfig, follow the source link and make sure the take is FIREFOX_8_0b4_RELEASE)

Reference

• Feature wiki page - Link

Use Cases to Test

• 1. A new build with other milestone is released and what's new page is suppressed
• 2. A new build with other milestone is released and what's new page is enabled

Test Cases

• The set of testcases can be found here

What will not be tested

• The client side functionality as it is available since Firefox 4
• Updates within same milestone

Important bugs

• Tracking bug: 459972 - Add new attributes to the update snippets - VERIFIED FIXED
• Test updates setup: 697030 - Create test updates for suppressing/not suppressing the What's New page - VERIFIED FIXED
• Dependencies:
  • 682805 - Generate snippets using new attributes - RESOLVED FIXED (qa-)
  • 530872 - app.update.url params / update.xml cleanup and addition of a custom string property for apps - RESOLVED FIXED (code clean-up)
  • 696278 - Update AUS2 code to AUS2_PRODUCTION (support for new attributes) - RESOLVED FIXED (qa-)

Sign-off criteria

• No major/critical bugs open
• All tests are run
• 50% of update paths are verified

Notes:

• Signed off on Firefox 8.0 beta 6 (build ID: 20111031184046)
• Signed off for Firefox 8