On 10/13/14 5:16 PM, Justin Dolske wrote:
On 10/13/14 4:54 PM, Chris More wrote:
Why am I asking this?
The win32 Firefox full installer continues to grow (see attachment)
each release and it has been on an increasing growth since Firefox
29. Like anything on the web, the time it takes to download something
(webpage, binary file, etc.) affects the key conversion rate by some
amount.
We have the (much smaller) stub installer for Windows now... I know
download size was a big factor for the full installer; do we know
anything about kind of impact it has for the stub installer?
Justin
Sure the stub allows for some better response and user interaction in
the early part of the process which can help sucess rates. At a minimum
it least give us some visibility into what is really happening at the
early stages of visiting the web site, and getting process kicked off,
but still leaves holes in understand the back end of the process.
There is another way to think about this. Its not so much a size
problem we are working against, but a time problem. Of course size has
impact on time, but its really time for the installer to complete the
download and installation that is the big challenge. The longer the
download takes the more chances there are for interruption and failure
from network errors, user distractions and "giving up", and other things
that can get in the way of completion.
Slow networks cause increase of time and more chance for failures. If we
are serving installers now to a higher pct. of users in under developed
world and slower connections we should expect the failure rates to be
increasing, and if we are expanding the size of the download we are
increasing the problem.
I think john jensen studied this a bit and had some a/b studies where we
increased the size of the installer and watched for failure rates to
increase but don't recall where the results were put. I also think
there were some serious limitations on the study and being able to
measure significant changes in download size, and different failure
rates at different download speeds/length of the installation process.
-chofmann
_______________________________________________
dev-platform mailing list
dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
