Blog of Metrics

As an intern here at Mozilla, I’ve learned that one of the core goals of the organization is to help build a better Internet by creating great software like the Firefox browser.  But like many other endeavors, one of the first steps to developing a browser, or software in general, is to know the end-users.

Consequently, we were excited to examine responses to the Firefox 4 Beta Background Survey. This short survey was pushed to all Beta users through the Feedback add-on and asked a few basic browsing behavior and demographic questions. In all, over 30,000 people, or roughly 7% of the entire Beta user-base, were kind enough to submit their responses.  Analyzing these submissions will not only help us understand the current Beta users, but also reveal the missing user groups we need to acquire to make the Beta sample more representative of the larger, general Firefox population.

So what did we find out? Who are our Firefox 4 Beta users?  Here are our main highlights:

1) The personal computer has been around longer than 75% of our Beta users

Although not surprising, our Beta population is concentrated among the lower age groups – over 75% of the Beta population is younger than 35 years old!  Even though we are skewed towards younger users, the good news is that there was a moderate increase in the participation of older users compared to our previous Test Pilot only sample.

2) Where are our Female Users? 96% of our Beta Population is male!

Evidently, our Beta Population is overwhelmingly skewed in terms of gender as 96% of users submitting feedback were male.

3) Early adopters are highly technical and spend multiple hours on the Internet a day

Due to the nature of betas, we expected the early adopters to be highly technical and spend a significant amount of time online.  Indeed, 69% of our Beta users are on the Web for over 4 hours a day, and 71% of gave themselves an advanced technical rating.

4) Entertainment, Communication and Socializing Drive Web Usage.

One of the most interesting aspects of this demographics survey was the potential to gain insights into the online interests of our Beta users.  We were particularly interested in identifying the main reasons why they use the web, as well as their most frequent visited websites. In particular, we found Beta users have three main reasons or using the web: Entertainment, Communication and Socializing.  We also noticed how these drivers were reflected in the most frequently visited websites as the top sites included News, Webmail, Social Networking, and Video content sites.

So what does all this survey information show? Overall, it clearly indicates that our Beta sample is far from representative of the general Firefox population. And in order to achieve more representative feedback, we need to increase the female, older and less technical user bases; we will definitely coordinate our Marketing, Metrics, and Community efforts to reach out to these users.

Maybe you existing Beta users can do some communicating and socializing to help us out! Tell your friends to download Firefox 4 Beta and help test the future of the Web!  Also, expect a follow-up blog post in the future as the makeup of the Beta sample evolves and (hopefully) becomes more representative.

Private Browsing was introduced in Firefox 3.5, giving users the option of browsing the web without keeping track of their history.  A recent Test Pilot study recorded, among other things, the time users activated Private Browsing, and the time they deactivated it.  Though what happens in Private Browsing stays in Private Private Browsing – that is, neither Firefox nor Test Pilot records anything during the period – we did learn a few things about the timing and duration of of Private Browsing mode sessions.

Here are a few simple insights we’ve gleaned from the data.

Note: Test Pilot is an opt-in service for Firefox 4 Beta users.  We would never record a user’s activity for any reason unless they explicitly signed up for this study.  Again, we do not record any information at all during a user’s Private Browsing session – only when private browsing was entered and exited. You can read over the Test Pilot Privacy Policy here.

Activation spikes at lunch.

Though people switch into Private Browsing mode throughout the day, there are a few periods where activation surges:

1. Lunch: users likely switch into Private Browsing during their lunch breaks.  We see a major spike between 11am and 2pm.
2. After School / Work: users appear to switch on Private Browsing just after they’ve returned from work or school, which is around 5pm.
3. After Dinner: there is another substantial usage peak between nine and ten pm.
4. Late Night: a minor spike exists an hour or two after midnight.

The 10-minute window is the most common.

Now that we know when users jump into Private Browsing, the next question involves finding out how long users stay in it.  The 25th percentile stays on for about 4 and a half minutes, the 75th percentile around 22 minutes, and the median stays in for about 10 minutes.

This trend appears to hold over the entire course of the day, with the notable exception of 5pm.  For some reason the median and lower quantiles are lower than the other hours.

We’ve more insights to glean from the Week-In-The-Life study.  Stay tuned for more.