Zack: that’s by design. Reporter is about Tech Evangelism bugs, it’s not a general Firefox bug reporting mechanism.

ehergenrader: Aren’t there people, e.g. NetCraft, who already keep such data to a much better level of fidelity than we ever could with random point-in-time reports from users?

We’d like to isolate (but keep) connection information because we’re interested in knowing when websites are down or not working properly. This is because in the future we might choose to integrate this type of data into a project like Harvard’s Herdict program, which runs a real-time map of website outages across the globe.

Maybe the following about timeouts would interest Mozilla: Practically all my timeouts are from Mozilla itself (mostly bugzilla.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org) at startup with a multitab homepage. (Reloading succeeds once all tabs have finished loading — or failed to load.)

Other thoughts: We might want to consider asking for contact information, and can we merge this system with hendrix?

A few things I noticed:

Users appear to frequently be using the Site Reporter thinking it is a way to get user assistance. Perhaps there is some way to make the purpose of the reporter clearer? Users want “support”, and I think they may be seeing and misunderstanding the word “support” in that first option. It might be a good idea if it were reworded to “site does not permit Firefox” or something like that.

Users report problems with Flash not installing or working on sites that need it. I wonder if there is any way to programatically detect that? (and better yet, automatically fix the problem for the user if possible)

Users report sites that look wrong because of inadvertently blocked images (When images are blocked from a site, there REALLY should be some visual indication something is being blocked and easily permitting people to unblock images, similar to how the popup blocker works.)

I had noticed numerous reports about being unable to open sites after Firefox updates. (I would suspect a firewall problem but they can contact the site reporter.)

And yes, I had also noticed many people submit a report whenever they get a 404 page, a connection timed out, or some other similar site error. Programatically detecting these errors would be very helpful.

It might also be nice if the reporter utility required or encouraged the user to enter some text to describe the problem. As it is when I query the database these days I exclude reports with no description as they are usually useless.

Is “Plugin not shown” really worth keeping? I wouldn’t expect many users to be able to figure this one out. Instead, if Firefox can detect that a plugin is missing, make an extra checked-by-default checkbox appear saying “Web page requires plugin for application/x-director, which I don’t have” or “… which I have disabled”.

Another case where we could automatically add a new checkbox is if the user has tried to print the page. Then it’s safe to put “[ ] Looks wrong when printed on paper” or even “[ ] Printed output wrong”.

Please drop the Title Case.

It might be good to add a checkbox labeled “Tell Mozilla what addons I have”. Then we can find out if AdBlock Plus or NoScript breaks some sites in subtle ways.

I think the web site reporter.mozilla.org needs a lot more love than the in-product dialogs. It’s nearly impossible to get useful information out of it because the query UI is so bad, you have to click each item to see the description, and hostname queries time out.