Community has always been a vital part of Firefox, from the first version, and even more so now. The recent Firefox third-party installer campaign, held online, underscores the importance of community participation to us. The main goal of the campaign was to help the Firefox team gather as much information as possible about third-party websites that offer Firefox desktop downloads.
As a disclaimer, for the best browsing experience, we recommend that users download Firefox through our official distribution channels on Mozilla.org or the Microsoft store, even though Firefox is available for download on many third-party websites.
Anyone may distribute unaltered copies of Mozilla softwares from Mozilla.org without expressed permission, as long as they comply with our distribution policy. However, we noticed that the quality of these distributions can suffer from lack of maintenance.
The Firefox team aimed to audit these third-party websites in order to work with them towards higher-quality distribution. This is crucial because these installers can put Firefox users at risk by providing an outdated version, a build with the wrong locale, or even malicious installations, leading to security risks and a poor user experience. We also noticed that users who install Firefox from unofficial sources tend to have lower new user retention.
Knowing that the team couldn’t solve this alone, the Firefox team joined forces with the Customer Experience team, a.k.a. support.mozilla.org, to design a community campaign for this endeavor.
Preparation began around the end of May 2024. We used a past similar campaign as a blueprint for this activity. Finally, we launched the campaign on the community portal and used Alchemer to host our submission form, allowing us to localize it. Despite the short time to prepare the campaign, we engaged with around 25 community localizers to help translate the campaign materials into different languages. This enabled us to offer the campaign in 20 locales, including en-US, pt-BR, pt-PT, es-MX, es, fr, de, nl, it, pl, el, tr, hi-IN, id, zh-CN, zh-TW, tl, ko, ja, vi, and ru.
As a result of this campaign, we received 1,844 reports in total. From these reports, we identified 683 unique third-party websites and 105 unique download links. The Firefox team is currently conducting further investigations with the QA team based on these reports.
We would like to extend our appreciation to the community members who participated in this campaign. We identified 47 people who submitted at least 10 valid reports. Special thanks to jonas-w, Preet Vaishnav, ngoclong19, Santiago FN, Zeb, Virus Killer, MathDesigns, Shashank Shekhar, Igor Maciejewski, Paul Heil, J.D., HAKANKOKCU, DJ F.T.S, Berk Demirag, Cristian E. Rodriguez, twistqj, Sebastian Paczoski, Ella Akkaya, Deepak Kumar, Ali Fleih, linjingsong666, Marcelo Ghelman, Nathan Verkerk, Woksup604, Pavel “NaTRenKO” Bernatski, VIKRAM.S, Sören Hentzschel, Cody Ortt, Wedone, Adri, Josh S, Kuvam Bhanot, Caleb Hawkins, Yutaro U, william A, aquaponieee, williammmm, Magnus Bache, Khalid Duel, Ryan Pratt, Sean B, Léo (Leeo) P, Bentouati Imadeddine, AyJay, Romar Mayer Micabalo, and wrkus.
Additionally, we’d like to sincerely thank our community localizers who helped translate the campaign landing page and submission form. Thank you to Marcelo, Luis, Gerardo, Pierre, Artist, Cláudio, Mark Heijl, Wim, Tim Maks, Michele, Chris, Jim, Selim, Mahtab, Fauzan, Lidya, Haoran, Wxie, Irvin, Ronx, Bob, Hyeonseok, Daisuke, Quế Tùng, and Dmitry. We couldn’t have done this without your contributions, and we cannot thank you enough.
Of course, many other parties were involved, including many other participants whom we can’t mention one by one. You’ve all been awesome, and we sincerely appreciate all your contributions to this project.