January, 2008

results — 35 Comments
30
Jan 08

600,000,000 Add-on Downloads

In John Lilly’s blog post in November about Firefox market share, he said one of the most important factors for figuring out how Firefox is doing is the health of addons.mozilla.org (also known as AMO). AMO recently hit a few milestones, so I thought an update (or perhaps initial view) of the add-ons community was in order.

Earlier this week, AMO served its 600 millionth add-on download. That’s original downloads, not including updates. We currently have over 4000 add-ons hosted on the site and between 800,000 and 1 million downloads every day. The site has around 4.5 million pageviews per day, not including services hosted on AMO such as update checks and blocklisting.

AMO now receives around 100 million add-on update pings every day. This is similar, but not exactly the same, to the “ADU” number as explained on John’s blog.

The application breakdown of those 100 million update pings looks like this for a particular day (in this case last Wednesday):

Firefox 1.x: 2%; Firefox 2.x: 93%; Firefox 3.x: 1%; Thunderbird: 4%

That’s over 1 million add-ons used daily in Firefox 3 alphas, betas, and trunk. So, in case you’ve missed our previous requests, please update your add-ons for Firefox 3!

We’re working to make this kind of data available to add-on developers in the near future, so look for a post on the Web Development blog about that soon.

results — 10 Comments
22
Jan 08

Firefox 3 extension compatibility chart

Here is a chart (renders correctly in Fx3) listing the top 95% of extensions, sized by usage. Helpful for tracking add-on compatibility with Firefox 3.

results — 1 Comment
22
Jan 08

A New Milestone in Firefox Usage

John will likely soon be discussing last week’s milestone in more detail, but in the meantime, we just wanted to highlight that Firefox exceeded 50 million active daily users for the first time last Wednesday (for background on our usage metric, please read here). The most impressive part of this accomplishment – aside from the contributions of our community members and contributors across the globe – is the sheer magnitude of growth that we continue to see on a daily basis. Firefox usage has recently been growing at a pace far exceeding anything we have seen in our history (in absolute numbers, not necessarily in percentage terms).

Over the past several months, the Firefox community has been growing by more than a half million new active daily users – every week.

Wow!

Uncategorized — 3 Comments
14
Jan 08

Firefox 3 Extension Compatibility Status

Extensions claiming Firefox beta compatibility

In the following graphs, each bar represents one of the top 100 extensions, by usage. The high of the bar is comparing relative usage. I.e. the most used extensions have the highest bars. Positive bars are compatible (blue), non-positive are not compatible (red).

Top 100 extensions claiming beta support (3.0b*, blue), non beta support (3.0b* red)

Top 100 extensions (beta)

Top 100 extensions claiming alpha and beta support (3*, blue), non alpha/beta support (non-3*, red)
Top 100 extensions (alpha + beta)

Uncategorized — 7 Comments
3
Jan 08

What factors affect Firefox usage?

A few months ago, we provided some initial analysis about how Firefox usage varies by day of the week (e.g., Wednesday vs. Saturday). We’ve since attempted to improve upon that analysis by making sure we’re accounting for everything in our statistical equation, allowing us to correctly isolate certain effects. For example, there is typically a significant drop-off in usage on holidays. In this case, we want to tease out the single effect of a day being a holiday, while also not allowing holidays to influence the other effects that we’re trying to measure (e.g., day of the week). Moreover, our numbers fluctuate in the days immediately following a Firefox release. This is in no way related to an actual change in usage by Firefox users; it’s attributable to the interaction of our updates with our security ping process (described here), but we still have to be cognizant of this factor while trying to understand our active daily user numbers.

Given these observable variables, our regression equation looks like:

Active Daily Users = α + β1dayofweek + β2month + β3holiday + β4daysafterupdate + ε

Are there any variables that we’re forgetting about on the right hand side of that equation? In other words, is there anything you’d expect to affect the number of active daily Firefox users that we also need to be thinking about (or that could be affecting the four variables we’re already including)?

The output for our regression equation is below. It uses our active daily user numbers from 2007 (number of instances = 327) and the R-squared is 0.95. The percentages are the regression coefficients relative to the constant (34.3 million).

We’d like to continue improving upon this analysis in the future; if you have any feedback, we’re all ears.