Wait, no, that makes absolutely no sense. So annoying when people trot out the “correlation != causation” in absolutely any discussion of statistics.

I think that you can’t imply correlation = causation in the way that you are above, sadly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation

I happen to agree that Firefox *has* gotten better, and frankly, I suspect it’s very possible your conclusions are close to truth. And yet you can’t assert them as truth, darn it!

Also, have you read Clay Shirky’s work on how users and their online habits follow a power law distribution? Assuming Shirky’s law is right, the savvier experts are reporting more sites, and the less-savvy users report less. This would also support the assumption that your logic above is flawed. I’d recommend Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody as a place to read about it.

Yes, and we’ll be looking at a lot of this in future posts . If you have a specific idea about analysis you think could be interesting/important, definitely let us know and we can try to incorporate it in out Broke Site Reporter series of posts.

This is definitely a valid hypothesis. The only real counter-argument I can see is the VERY simple interface of the tool. It really requires no technical expertise to use, and I have confidence all users COULD use the tool. That said, it’s true the more technical users are probably more likely to know it is there.

There really is no plausible way (that I can think of) to quantify this kind of relationship (any ideas?). This is one reason why I did not attempt any explicit statistical modeling, but I think from an economical point of view you’re exactly right – the decrease is most likely a mix of all three.

Thanks for the post!

Granted, it’s probably a mix of all three, but I think it’s still important to consider what type of user files reports and how many of them there are.