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> In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. Does anyone know where they get this data from?

tempest_ 2y ago
Presumably telemetry coming back
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
chickenimprint 2y ago
I assume by comparing the sum of the downloads from all official channels to new telemetry instances claiming to come from Firefox packaged by Mozilla. about:telemetry#environment-data-tab_partner
jakub_g 2y ago
Guessing, and not sure if this is relevant here, but some software (browsers like Chrome [1]) store filesystem metadata with the origin of the file download source. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/b2j16p/til_chromiumbased_browsers_tag_downloads_with_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/b2j16p/til_chromi...
- MarkSweep 2y ago
  It’s not Chrome specific, the “mark of the web” is applied to any downloaded file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Web
bhearsum2 2y ago
I have worked on this in the past, and still touch it from time to time. This data comes from attribution data (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/attribution/docs/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/a...) and the installation ping (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/data/install-ping.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...). Most of the Firefox installers/packages for Windows & macOS on https://archive.mozilla.org/ https://archive.mozilla.org/ have a sentinel value for attribution data that indicates "this is a build that Mozilla produced and uploaded to archive.mozilla.org", and is considered to be from a known source. (Anyone that downloads directly from archive and redistributes will maintain this data and also be considered known.) Downloads that flow through www.mozilla.org and meet certain conditions (most notably, Do Not Track being disabled) will have this data overwritten at download time with UTM parameter information (see the first link above). These are considered to be from a known source as well (our own website!). I'm not an _expert_ on the analysis side of this data, but I believe that install pings that don't contain attribution data are considered "unknown". (There may be other cases that end up in the "unknown" bucket as well - I honestly don't know.) On Windows, there's a _shockingly_ high percentage of installs that fall into this bucket.

tempest_ 2y ago

Presumably telemetry coming back

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

chickenimprint 2y ago

I assume by comparing the sum of the downloads from all official channels to new telemetry instances claiming to come from Firefox packaged by Mozilla. about:telemetry#environment-data-tab_partner

jakub_g 2y ago

Guessing, and not sure if this is relevant here, but some software (browsers like Chrome [1]) store filesystem metadata with the origin of the file download source. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/b2j16p/til_chromiumbased_browsers_tag_downloads_with_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/b2j16p/til_chromi...

MarkSweep 2y ago
It’s not Chrome specific, the “mark of the web” is applied to any downloaded file: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_of_the_Web

bhearsum2 2y ago

I have worked on this in the past, and still touch it from time to time. This data comes from attribution data (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/attribution/docs/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/a...) and the installation ping (https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/telemetry/data/install-ping.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/components/t...). Most of the Firefox installers/packages for Windows & macOS on https://archive.mozilla.org/ https://archive.mozilla.org/ have a sentinel value for attribution data that indicates "this is a build that Mozilla produced and uploaded to archive.mozilla.org", and is considered to be from a known source. (Anyone that downloads directly from archive and redistributes will maintain this data and also be considered known.) Downloads that flow through www.mozilla.org and meet certain conditions (most notably, Do Not Track being disabled) will have this data overwritten at download time with UTM parameter information (see the first link above). These are considered to be from a known source as well (our own website!). I'm not an _expert_ on the analysis side of this data, but I believe that install pings that don't contain attribution data are considered "unknown". (There may be other cases that end up in the "unknown" bucket as well - I honestly don't know.) On Windows, there's a _shockingly_ high percentage of installs that fall into this bucket.