Mozilla Labs Wants To Monitor (Volunteers') Firefox Use

Howardd21 writes "PC World reports that Mozilla Labs wants 1% of its Firefox users to voluntarily provide information about how they use the browser, and their web browsing habits. This would be done through an add-on named "Test Pilot" that collects the information and associates it with some demographic information that the user has provided. Unlike other data collection utilities that software developers may include to provide usage information, the add-on will follow the same open source concept that Firefox adheres to, allowing the market to better understand what is being collected. Mozilla Labs stresses privacy when discussing how they will collect, store and use the data, including publishing it for other researchers to to analyze."

Comments

I hope they aren't planing to follow M$ office

[quickOnTheUptake]

The data collection mechanism is internally called âoeService Quality Monitoringâ, or just SQM. It was introduced in Office 2003, and presents itself to the user as âoeCustomer Experience Improvement Programâ (CEIP), or you might also see it under the heading of âoeHelp Make Office Betterâ. . . .What did Microsoft do with the data? It turns out, a lot. The data combined with human judgment was the basis for the placement of all commands on the Ribbon. The Home tab in all programs is a great example of the statistics at work. The commands on the Home tab represent the 80% most used commands of that particular application.

From: here

"One difference between Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.0 is that the Back button grew in size," Raskin said. "Why did it change? Because we found that people used the Back button much more than the Forward button."

I hope this information about most used features isn't going to be used to develop a Mozilla ribbon.

Re:I hope they aren't planing to follow M$ office

[scottrocket]

Additional info from Mozilla

Overview of Test Pilot We can provide a much more satisfying experience all around by putting in place some basic infrastructure. Here's the idea: * We develop and promote a formal Test Pilot program with a Firefox add-on at its core.
* The first time the Test Pilot add-on is run, it asks a few simple non-personally-identifiable questions in order to put the user into a demographic bucket, e.g. technical level, locale, etc., and to let them opt in to additional anonymous instrumentation.
* Test Pilot will then notify its users when a new experiment is available for testing. If the user opts in, it will download the required software (if any) and load any information required to get started with the new experiment, e.g. overview, use cases, etc.
* After either a specified amount of time or upon completion of a specific action, Test Pilot will prompt the user for feedback. The feedback form will only ask a few questions selected from a much larger set. A link will be provided to provided more comprehensive unstructured feedback or bug reports.
* The set of questions posed for feedback will be randomly distributed within each demographic bucket to ensure statistical significance of the results.
* Anonymized aggregate results and analysis will then be posted automatically to the Test Pilot site.
* * All participants will receive a "flight badge" displayed in their Test Pilot profile and available to embed on blogs, social networks, etc.
The idea is that by reducing the amount of required feedback to only a few clicks we can increase overall rates of participation.

If they give me a physical flight badge to wear on my hat, I might do it.

I would volunteer and good on them !

[johnjones]

first thing is testing and the best thing is feedback

yes crash reporter's help but the best thing is real feedback about what actually is stressing the engine

are javascript functions that rarely get used the best use of the engineers time ?
knowing what is going on and what really stress's the engines is profiling
Profiling is a good thing
Hard to do right without actually asking real users to do it

I welcome the fact they actually doing it themselves and building it out in a open way !

regards

John Jones

Re:How about add needed features instead?

[grasshoppa]

Absolutely. I would love firefox to be a viable browser in the workplace, but it simply isn't given the way settings are stored alone, nevermind the inability to patch and update.

Re:How about add needed features instead?

[duffbeer703]

That would allow users to install automatic updates, but would open up the computers for massive ownage by zero-day threats.