Why Do Firefox Downloads Spike on Release Days?

Ken Kovash    process, results    

As Daniel pointed out, there has always been a dramatic increase in fresh downloads/installs of Firefox at the time of each minor version release – separate from people simply being updated.  We’ve never entirely understood this user behavior until Daniel started some digging yesterday.  Here’s what we know…

• Yesterday (just after 3.0.18 and 3.5.8 were released) we saw a spike in fresh downloads/installs of Firefox.  The typical daily number is in the ballpark of 2 Million and yesterday it shot up to over 4 Million.
• As Daniel highlighted, nearly all of the download activity was for Firefox 3.6.
• Digging a little deeper, we also discovered that the entire spike in 3.6 downloads was coming from people on Firefox 3.5.8.  This means people successfully got the update yesterday (3.5.8), and then went out of their way to manually do one further update (i.e., get 3.6).

Why or how is this happening?

It turns out that the answer was right under our nose.   When people get an update, they see an update page.  And if they’re not on the current major version (e.g., 3.6), the page suggests that they go and download the lastest and greatest.   So, what happened within this user interaction yesterday?

So, this explains a common experience for millions of users each time a Firefox update is shipped.  And it’s good to see the messaging on that 3.5.8 update page (and all older update pages) is paying off.  Perhaps we should consider changing the concept of those pages to be even more aggressive in getting people to update to the latest and greatest.

An Improved Experience for New Users of Firefox

Ken Kovash    plans, results    

Over the past year, we set out to identify and solve any possible pain points that might arise during a person’s experience downloading and installing Firefox (previous posts are here, here, here, here, and here).  Thanks to feedback from users, and some resulting product changes, we can now safely say that there are no issues confronting new users when installing Firefox for the very first time.

How do we know this?

Last week, we re-ran our installer feedback mechanism for a short period of time.  If a user clicked “cancel” while walking through the Firefox installer, they were asked if they wanted to provide feedback.

After making an initial round of product improvements based on our first time feedback (March ‘09), here are the transformed feedback results from our more recent efforts (both July 2009 and last week):

While we still have plans to tackle the remaining big slice of the pie (see concluding paragraph), we were able to successfully solve the red and green pie slices from last time.  In our latest feedback results (pie on the right), the big pie slice now represents nearly 100% of the total feedback (the previously seen categories virtually evaporated).  One way to interpret this is that we’ve now successfully identified and resolved 3 of the top 4 issues originally encountered by users.

Here were the specific actions we took addressing those red and green slices (details are in bug 508684):

Don’t Want Firefox as Default

People indicating this issue were missing the selection option earlier in the installation process, arrived at the end, and mistakenly believed that we were making Firefox their default without being given a choice.  So, we added the choice to the final step in the installer:

Confusion About Updating-Upgrading-Installing

We did a few different things to help address this area of confusion.  First, we added content to mozilla.com and prominently displayed it on the main Firefox product pages seen by existing users:

Second, within the Firefox installer, we changed the Install button to say “Upgrade” instead of “Install”:

Thanks to Rob Strong, the Firefox team, the Funnelcake team, John Slater, and Laura Mesa, among others, for implementing the changes highlighted above.

Lastly, there remains one outstanding problem for installers of Firefox – “it tells me to close Fx, but it’s not open” (the big pie slice in the charts above).  This issue affects people who already have Firefox and are attempting to reinstall it, and as we’ve noted previously, this cohort becomes fairly frustrated during the experience.    Some fixes are starting to be contemplated (e.g., bugs 496207, 544356)… and I’ll make sure to talk more here once some progress is made.