Progressive rollouts for release features
The latest Firefox release (141) on Android introduced a couple of new features marked as "progressive rollout", e.g. the ability to protect private tabs via PIN, while the release also brought regular updates, e.g. security fixes.
Does someone know how a progressive rollout of such a feature works technically for the userbase? How can a release be rolled out, but some of its features be kept back while other changes apply to all?
For example, the ability to set a PIN for private tabs is a local user preference configuration. The user may or may not have a user sync profile. How is it possible to rollout the feature progressively on the same release channel? Or does the progressive rollout imply the first group of users receive the feature with consecutive minor releases, e.g. release 141.1, the next group with 141.2, etc?
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ప్రత్యుత్తరాలన్నీ (4)
Hi
Mozilla staff can turn on a new feature in stages remotely (securely and in a privacy respecting way). So a feature may be launched with a particular release, but then might still be staggered just to make sure it is working fine.
Hi,
thanks for your swift response, Paul. What technological framework enables mozilla staff to stagger the rollout? Is the staggering done when an updated release first loads and pings the mozilla backend? And is that a dynamic change, i.e. could it be rolled back (for the cohort, not individual installations) as well if needed?
I tried to find info on the wiki and via other progressive feature update examples, but have not come across a technicality on how it is done. Well, one - the activation of DOH presets was apparently staggered by regions defined in about:config settings and there were examples how to override (manually activate the settings).
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Hi, thanks, that helps a lot to understand how the progressive rollouts are navigated!
To anyone reading up: Most of the Experimenter tool employed deals with studies, but the doc includes sections on rollouts, e.g. [1], [2], and a FAQ item [3] about dual deployment of both. The 'Additional Links' section then includes the tools, e.g. [4].
[1] https://experimenter.info/deep-dives/experimenter/rollouts/ [2] https://experimenter.info/auto-sizing-cli/ [3] https://experimenter.info/deep-dives/experimenter/rollouts [4] https://experimenter.info/system-architecture
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