Just a quick update to yesterday’s story… after careful research, Net Applications has discovered the cause behind the anomaly in April’s data. They’ve issued an alert on their site and they’ll soon be re-releasing their market share data (some new numbers already appear here).
Thanks again to Phil and Vince of Net Applications for their concern and hard work.
The short answer: no, there likely was not a change.
One of the top sources for browser market share analysis recently released some interesting data showing a decline in worldwide market share for Firefox during the March to April time period.
Our internal numbers show healthy growth for Firefox usage during that time, and we found it a bit odd that both Opera and Safari also showed losses, while IE took a big step forward. Thankfully, we were able to dig into the numbers via Net Applications’ service; and even more helpful than that, the good folks over at Net Applications sprung into action to see if they could dive even deeper into the data.
What did we find?
We’re not entirely sure what explains the IE related events described above, so we’re continuing to work with Net Applications in researching the situation. For example, one educated hypothesis is that it has something to do with Microsoft’s update mechanism (they released SP1 for Vista users around April 18th).
There are likely to be more articles about the data (such as this), so our goal here is just to be as open and transparent as possible. We’ll keep you updated as we uncover more details.
Right on the heels of our previous discussion about Firefox 3 beta’s adoption, I noticed that Net Applications has a “featured report” highlighting Firefox 3’s increasing worldwide market share:
We’ve known for some time that Firefox 3 (beta versions) is being adopted at incredible rates. In other words, in terms of aggregate numbers of active daily users, we’ve seen far more users of Fx3 beta than we ever saw with Fx2 beta.
I was curious about taking this knowledge one step further – how does the adoption rate compare on a percentage basis across time periods?
In late September 2006 (one month prior to the official release of Fx2), here’s what the situation looked like:
(Fx2 beta users)/(Fx1.5 users) = 1.4%
Today, here’s what the current situation looks like for Firefox 3:
(Fx3 beta users)/(Fx2 users) = 2.0%
How should one interpret these numbers? There are certainly different ways to think about this. However, I think the biggest takeaway is two-fold: (1) Firefox 3 rocks and (2) our users remain extraordinarily passionate. Downloading a beta product requires a user to both make an informed decision and go out of their way to intentionally take an action, and the fact that millions of people around the globe have already taken this step with Firefox 3 is utterly amazing.
We just want to give an appreciative acknowledgment to Google AdWords for a recent change to their policy regarding display URL’s. While we’re most excited about how this rule change is a big win for most businesses and all consumers, we thought it might be interesting to describe the impact from Mozilla’s perspective. In short, other advertisers are no longer able to show ads that display something like “mozilla.com” or “firefox.com” as their domain (then redirecting to their actual site).
Why does this matter? The example below, captured a couple months ago, provides a powerful illustration. Neither of those two ads on the right-hand side belongs to Mozilla (nor are sending clickers our way)! An advertiser was previously able to list anything they desired as the URL displayed and then send the consumer to a completely different, unrelated web site. The process, from the consumer’s perspective, was non transparent, and in extreme cases, could be dangerous.
And here’s a close-up:
Please note: we’re always happy to see affiliates helping with the distribution of Firefox; we’d just prefer that other advertisers not use our actual domains (e.g., mozilla.com) in their ads (when those ads are not actually directing users to Mozilla’s sites).
What’s remarkable here is that Google may take a revenue hit as a result of this change. I’m guessing they made this decision because it’s clearly in the best interest of consumers and because it’s the right thing to do. It’s always enlightening to see a company put the interest of users ahead of the interest of shareholders.
John Lilly recently wrote an excellent post about our passion around the Firefox user experience. I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about how this same mission applies to marketing and analytics at Mozilla. Perhaps a story would be a good way to start this discussion…
Yesterday, I spent some time on Google’s localized sites (e.g., www.google.cn) searching for Firefox related terms. I was curious if a new Firefox user is able to easily find a Mozilla related web site and download Firefox if he/she decides that’s what they want to do. For the most part, the answer seems to be “yes” – search for “firefox” in other Google language versions and our web sites (and affiliates) occupy the top search results. There was one exception, though, where this was not the case (I’d prefer for the locale be remain nameless). Searching for “firefox” in this particular locale showed a questionable site as the #2 result and a “mozilla” search displayed a questionable site as the #1 search result. Within a few minutes, I created an adwords campaign for just that locale to ensure that more new users are able to more easily find us (we’re also working on a few other longer-term solutions).
So, you may be wondering why, between this story and previous posts on this blog, I’m so obsessed with search marketing? In short, it’s because of the Firefox user experience.
Typically, user experience is defined by a user’s experience and direct interaction with a product. With Firefox, for example, direct interaction consists of many things: all the technologies and development that goes into the product itself, as well as the forward facing interface (e.g., all the great work done by folks like Mike Beltzner and Alex Faaborg).
I’d like to add a slightly broader definition of “user experience.” For me at least, it seems as though a user’s experience with Firefox begins at the moment that person conceives the idea in their mind that they’d like to try Firefox. Once that idea is conceived, the user then attempts to find Firefox (e.g., perhaps they already know about www.mozilla.com or perhaps they go to a search engine). And once the user takes this step, he/she makes a few clicks and navigates their way to the download process. All of these interactions are important in this broader view of “user experience,” and making these interactions as efficient and delightful as possible for the user drives much of the marketing and analytics efforts here at Mozilla.
Last week, a group of Stanford students delivered their senior project and presentation, titled “Mozilla World” (previously introduced here). In short, their project is part of a broader effort at Mozilla to better understand the international dynamic of Firefox usage and the user experience. We hope to eventually share some of the details of their report, but for the interim, I thought it would be interesting to share the punch line, i.e., their recommendations:
While some of the team’s arguments were based more on guess-work than science, these recommendations are definitely thought provoking and they bring up some new questions for us to ponder.
Lastly, we want to thank Ben Dickens, Chris Emba, Kelton Lynn and Rishi Mallik for all their hard work last quarter!
Since we put Spectator on AMO two days ago we have already recorded 41,537 UI interactions and 361,438 page loads (no URLs!) from 153 users.
Community is also starting to build around this tool. First, a Mr. Kurt filed a bug requesting Spectator be bundled with all Firefox builds. Next, the friendly Andy Edmonds created a pmog mission around contributing to Firefox passively. Thanks Kurt and Andy!
Just as a teaser, some trivia that will make the Firefox 3 theme developers happy. What UI element has gotten the most action today? Back button.
We are looking forward to digging deeper into this data set while exploring ways to share it.
Spectator is finally live on AMO. Spectator is a Firefox extension that collects data about how Firefox is used. This information is used to better understand what people value in the browser.
We’ve taken a lot of time to strike a balance between helpful data and privacy. If you would like to contribute to usability at Mozilla, please give the extension a spin (only works with Fx3). All you have to do is install the add-on! It will run with out you ever even knowing it is there.
Please see our entry on wiki.mozilla.org for more details about the extension.
Several months back we discussed a project called Funnelcake. The goal was to begin to understand the path of Firefox users from download all the way through to long-term usage and to see if there were any pain points along the way for our users.
In terms of numbers, we found that 57% of downloaders successfully installed Firefox, and of this smaller cohort, 49% were retained as active daily users thirty days later. Presently, we’re about five months removed from that original time period, so we thought it would be interesting to see what those numbers look like today. In other words, of the group of people who downloaded and installed Firefox on October 4, 2007, how many are still actively using the browser in February 2008?
You’ll see in the chart above that there has been very little drop-off in usage over the past few months. While 49% of installers were still using the browser thirty days later, that percentage has decreased only to 42% nearly five months after the fact. Wow!
This means that Firefox is sticky, really sticky. It means that if someone used Firefox shortly after installing, they’re likely still using it regularly (or daily) five or six months later.
Here’s another way to look at it: five months after users downloaded just two locales (en-US & de) of Firefox on a single day (24-hour period), we see approx. 40,000 of these users each and every day. That’s a mind boggling stat, and only possible because of the amazingly hard work of thousands of contributors.
