Kicking old Mozilla suite users

The Mozilla suite is dead. OK, that might be old news for you. Using the outdated Mozilla suite is a security risk, as you already know. And with the alive-and-kicking SeaMonkey suite and Firefox browser there are quite good upgrade paths available, and you, of course, have followed one of those a long time ago.

Probably this is really true for you - but unfortunately there are a lot of people out there that have not upgraded to one of our current products yet and are still risking their security daily by using a hopelessly outdated browser. You want numbers? OK, here they are: www.seamonkey.at is the homepage of the German SeaMonkey and Mozilla suite localization - and happens to also contain the default start page of those localized suite versions. That domain had 3.2 million page views in February, originating from about 1.1 million different IP addresses (OK, each address is counted once per day, but I guess that doesn't matter much there). Of course, most of those hits come from people hitting their browser's default start page, 56% of all hits go to that page - so it's no surprise that the suites are leading stats for browsers there. The downside is which one is first - it's still the old, outdated, insecure Mozilla suite, scoring 65% of all hits (bots excluded) on that domain in February! SeaMonkey is "only" second with 29% of all hits, leaving 6% to the browsers that don't have their start page set to this domain - mainly Firefox (3.5%) and MSIE (1.4%), all other scoring far below 1% of all hits. That's surely no representative picture of the web, but it should be quite representative for relative adoption of Mozilla suite vs. SeaMonkey (in German-speaking countries - and I doubt other regions of the world would be much different).

For me, having 960,000 hits a month with SeaMonkey is a good start - but after more than a year of stable SeaMonkey releases and 10 months after the last Mozilla suite update, the amount of remaining Mozilla users is really scary - and looking at a version breakdown is even more so, as 1.7.13 only scores 10%, which means that over 50% of my site hits are even older Mozillas (while about 40% of the SeaMonkey users are using 1.1.x already).

So, clearly, something needs to be done to get Mozilla users to migrate to a newer browser. Someone has to kick their butt, so to say. And now, in bug 373065, we're trying to do something in that way for the default en-US version (and I'll go with a similar approach for German at about the same time). We'll be showing all those people a big warning on their start page that they're using outdated, insecure software. At the same time, we'll be pointing them to the recommended upgrade paths - and yes, Mozilla representatives also feel we should present SeaMonkey and Firefox as equal choices there. Yay! It really feels good that our project is recognized that way

I'm still waiting for some text improvements by Paul Kim from Firefox Marketing and an OK from Gerv from MoFo - but expect to see this warning hitting your start page soon. Oh wait, I forgot, you already upgraded, right?