The Firefox Community – International Participation

Ken Kovash    plans    

We’ve talked a lot here lately about the proliferation of Firefox usage around the world and about the early adoption of Firefox 3.  Today, something combining both of these subjects was announced – Download Day.

The coolest thing to watch is the interactive map.  You can see the number of pledges grow by the minute, and you can visually see the extreme international scope of our community.  Check it out!

The Psychology of Downloading Firefox

Ken Kovash    plans, process    

What attributes of a browser are most important to a prospective user when he/she is considering downloading a new browser?

This is a question we’ve set out to answer.  For marketing purposes, for example, this type of knowledge could be tremendously useful for Mozilla.  One of the key learnings that any student takes away from business school is the power of conjoint analysis, which can precisely answer our question.  However, such market research can be time consuming, expensive and often quite complex.  Fortunately, our question is much simpler than the one facing most consumer marketers for two reasons:

1. Typically with conjoint analysis, each attribute can be broken down into different levels.  As the Wikipedia example points out, the screen format for TVs includes the levels of CRT, plasma, LCD, etc.  But in the case of web browsers, a browser generally either has a feature or it doesn’t, e.g., there aren’t different levels of tabbed browsing as a feature.
2. The decision being made by a new, prospective browser user is fairly binary in nature.  In other words, it’s either “yes, I’ll download” or “no, I don’t want to download”.  On the other hand, typically with conjoint analysis, a marketer has to design several prototypes of a product and allow the prospective buyer to assign some dollar amount to each feature-level combination (i.e., the results are along a relatively complex spectrum).

Given the situation outlined above, and given that we frequently look for marketing solutions beyond the traditional (e.g., not “let’s hire a market research firm and let them figure it out”), David Rolnitzky and I had the idea of using search marketing to see if we could find the answers to our original question.

In other words, given a control ad variation, what if we swap out a few words of an existing advertisement with a highlight of a new feature in Firefox 3?  For example, a text ad within AdWords includes four lines (text and URLs).  If our existing (control) ad variation has a line stating, “More Customizable!”, perhaps we could rotate other phrases in its place, e.g., “Now with the Awesome Bar!” or “Now with Improved Support!”

If the results show that simply changing one line within an advertisement has a big impact on whether or not prospective new users click on the ad, then we’ll presumably have an idea as to which attributes of Firefox are most important to the user in their download decision process.  Perhaps there are some flaws in our thinking here or in our methodologies, but this exercise seems worth trying given both our situation and the question we’re attempting to answer.

We’re currently in the very early stages of this experiment, so please let us know if you have any suggestions for what Firefox features/attributes (or associated ad phrases) we should be considering.

Life after Launch of Firefox 3

Ken Kovash    plans    

As we approach the official release of Firefox 3, I thought it’d be an interesting thought exercise to start considering what life will look like shortly after that special day.  In other words, where will the Mozilla community see itself one month after launch, e.g., what will the adoption picture look like?

One approach would be to devise a statistical model to predict the future of Firefox 3.  Another, more intuitive approach is to simply layout the events surrounding the launch of Fx2 (October ‘06) and let the readers of blog of metrics take some educated guesses.  In the charts below, Firefox 1.5 is the blue line and Firefox 2 is the red line.

Here’s my own fuzzy match… In total, we saw about 22 million cumulative downloads of Fx2 in its first month after release.  That number translated to about 8 million active daily users one month later.  The Mozilla community is now more than twice as large as it was back then (e.g., in terms of # of users), so perhaps we can estimate that we could see 50 million cumulative downloads of Fx3 in its first month after launch, and that this number could translate to about 20 million daily active users of Fx3 within that first month.

Your thoughts?

What www.mozilla.com tells us about our global community

Ken Kovash    plans, results    

We’ve known for a long time that several Firefox product pages (e.g., download.html) are closely tied with the Firefox user experience.  What we didn’t previously know is exactly how closely our community’s interaction with www.mozilla.com speaks to Firefox’s global reach.  As recently mentioned, we’ll soon have a much more structured dialogue around the international impact of Firefox, but before we get to that, we wanted to point out another somewhat surprising fact:

International visits to Mozilla.com come very close to approximating actual global usage of Firefox

Even though the two metrics are measured by two separate systems using two different geoip technologies, and even though the product page experience can differ by Firefox build and locale, and even though we have several separate international web properties (e.g., mozilla-europe.org, mozilla-japan.org, mozillaonline.com) that we’re not including here – after considering all of these things, when looking at a breakdown of visitors to www.mozilla.com we see a pattern that almost exactly mirrors actual global usage of Firefox.

Similar to what Schrep previously highlighted, our analysis is below.  Usage of Firefox by country is in the second column and a breakdown of visitors to www.mozilla.com is in the third column (both are % of total).  These numbers are from the current month of May (thus far).

So, what’s the main takeaway here?  Web analytics is critical for Mozilla.  The ability to take a partial temperature of the Firefox user experience on a per country basis and help fix any pain points for our users should be a big win for the Firefox community.

Hello Madrid!

Ken Kovash    process    

We’ll eventually be talking a lot more about this, but for today, I wanted to present one slice of data that got me excited.  Mozilla recently implemented Omniture as our web analytics solution for www.mozilla.com and we’re just starting to poke around in understanding how Firefox users interact with our web site.   As an example, the report below shows the top 10 cities with visitors to mozilla.com so far in the month of May:

A few things that stand out:

• Manila is #4!
• There’s only one U.S. city in the top 10
• Our web traffic has a verrrry long tail.  The top 10 cities represent about 10% of our web traffic and the top 1,000 cities represents 83% of mozilla.com visitors.

Fluctuations in International Internet Usage

Ken Kovash    plans, results    

In thinking about broad questions such as “how do people use the internet?”, one very simple and curious problem solving approach would be considering how usage of the internet fluctuates (e.g., over time, by country, by web site, by segment of users, etc.).  Whether the cause is something as simple as seasonal patterns (e.g., perhaps usage declines during summer months) or as complex as genuine shifts in users’ behavior, an understanding here seems like a very basic and critical need for the technology arena and business world.

For example, one pattern we’ve noticed here at Mozilla is that the overall usage of Firefox seems to decline a bit during this time of year.  In 2007, for example, the number of average daily users (ADU) declined by about 2% from April to May.  Even though we’re currently less than halfway through the month of May, it looks like a similar pattern will likely hold in 2008.

So, the first question this raises is: is this pattern in Firefox usage representative of the entire internet population?  The answer seems to be “yes.”  Looking at comScore’s data (subscription required), the number of worldwide average daily visitors dropped during April and May 2007 (relative to its level that March), jumped back up in June and then declined again in July and August 2007.  This pattern tracked extremely closely with month-to-month Firefox usage.

The next question this raises is: “why?” (and why aren’t folks talking more about this?).  In short, the answer to the former seems to be holidays.  Much of the world celebrates some version of May Day or Labour Day on May 1st.  Moreover, countries like China and Japan enjoy “golden week” holidays.  While it may seem hard to understand how a single holiday can have such a macro level effect, consider this: all else constant, if overall internet usage drops by 30% within just a single day, that month will show a 1% decline in average daily users.

As cool as it is to uncover this pattern and its potential causes, the question I raise in parentheses above seems like the most interesting part of this discussion.  And it starts to touch on the recent discussion by John Lilly and Mike Arrington (and John’s follow-up here).  Many cohorts (curious users, university researchers, small businesses, etc.) would certainly be interested in the opening up of all sorts of data… indeed, much of the reason folks aren’t talking more about questions such as “how do people use the web?” primarily relates to information being locked up.

Firefox Worldwide Market Share – update

Ken Kovash    results    

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.

Firefox Worldwide Market Share – was there a change?

Ken Kovash    results    

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?

1. Usage of Firefox did not appear to decline in April.
2. Usage of IE saw an ultra unusual spike over the period of a few days in April.  While there was steady traffic from IE users – as measured by page views – for a short period surrounding April 18th, there was a huge spike in traffic from IE users – as measure by unique visitors – during the same time period.  When I say “huge spike”, I mean something on order of 25% to 50% greater than what could have been expected.
3. Most of IE’s spike was attributable to IE6 users on XP (with some assistance from IE7 users on Vista), and nearly the entire spike came from users outside North America.

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.