Zach's Blog

Red/Blue State Politics and Browser Usage

Since there's nothing like discussing politics to pump up my readership...

I came across this graph in a post on DailyKos last night. It shows browser usage (as measured by an image hosted on both sites) for both Kos, a liberal blog, and Free Republic, a conservative site. I believe the heading says it all: Firefox is blue. Internet Explorer is red.

Build ID Detection in Litmus

In order to track test results in Litmus, we obviously need to know the build id of the product under test. In the case of Thunderbird or another product, the user is going to need to look it up and enter it manually, but for Firefox, we should be able to auto-detect from the UserAgent it and enter it as a default automatically. The catch is that we can't, at least not yet.

A full Firefox build id is in the form: YYYYMMDDHH. This is the complete id that Litmus needs to accurately match a result with a build. Unfortunately, the build id that appears in both the UserAgent string and the About Dialog is only a shortened form: YYYYMMDD.

Currently, users can either enable codebase_principal_support, which is difficult for casual testers, or go look up the full build id manually, which requires drilling down into the application directory to find the master talkback config file and viewing it with a text editor, even more of a burden for casual testers.

Does anyone know why only the shortened build id is available in the UA string and the About Dialog? It would really be useful for Litmus if the full id were more easily accessible. For testing of Thunderbird and other projects, access to the full build id in the About box would be useful to make it easy for testers to copy and paste it right into Litmus.