Winners of Mozilla Open Data Competition

An anonymous reader writes "Back in November, Mozilla Labs and the Metrics Team together launched the first Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition. While we set out to discover creative visual answers to the open question, "How do people use Firefox," we really didn't know what level of participation to expect from the Mozilla and data analysis communities. In fact, we were overwhelmed by both the number and quality of submissions – so much so that we had to give ourselves an extra few days to thoroughly review them. In all, we received 32 high-caliber submissions. The visualizations took a number of forms, from tools to easily query the data to interactive web applications. They also covered a broad range of important topics, from plugin memory consumption to user web activities."

Comments

open vs free

[Anonymous Coward]

applies to data as much as software.

How do people use Firefox?

[morgan_greywolf]

That's kind of silly question isn't it? It's a Web browser. People use it browse the Web, obviously. Duh.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[Musically_ut]

That's kind of silly question isn't it? It's a Web browser. People use it browse the Web, obviously. Duh.

How they use it, not what they use it for.

They might be using it to heat the room or power pacemakers, by the stats we see.

Disclaimer: Was one of the participants.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[h4rr4r]

With Vimperator, the only good way to use it. Is that what you meant?

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[metalmaster]

Plug-ins make it possible to do other things. Consider something like "chatzilla" which extends firefox's capabilities to that of a functioning IRC client. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine uses firefox solely for its chatzilla functionality because she turned to the "faster" Chrome browser for day-to-day web surfing

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[Musically_ut]

Plug-ins make it possible to do other things. Consider something like "chatzilla" which extends firefox's capabilities to that of a functioning IRC client. As a matter of fact, a friend of mine uses firefox solely for its chatzilla functionality because she turned to the "faster" Chrome browser for day-to-day web surfing

Though that is anecdotal evidence, but a little digging of this same survey data (by Firefox 4 beta testers) suggests that a surprisingly large fraction of non-Firefox users who are beta testing Firefox 4 are Chrome users.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago I built a jukebox with a mini-atx system using the composite output to display the interface on my tv.

To make a long story short, I used Mozilla in full screen mode to display the php driven controls.

So, I wasn't browsing the web with it. I was organizing and listening to music with it.

At work I am planning to roll out some single purpose kiosks in the reception area to automate some currently manual processes. At the heart is a php driven backend with fullscreen firefox on a touchscreen.

No web involved.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[Musically_ut]

With Vimperator, the only good way to use it. Is that what you meant?

+1

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[CyberDragon777]

But HOW do they browse the web?

Do they use bookmarks? Do they write the address of the pages in the location bar? Do they use the search box? What search engines do they add to the search box? Do they change the home page?
Which buttons do they click the most? Which menu options are the most used? What options do they change?
How many tabs do they have open in average? How many addons do they install? etc.

There are LOTS of ways someone can "browse the web".

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[h4rr4r]

The only thing that really keeps me on it. Chrome and Chromium-browser are ok, but without a way to radically change the functionality in the way vimperator changes firefox I just can't use them.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[fishexe]

That's kind of silly question isn't it? It's a Web browser. People use it browse the Web, obviously. Duh.

Because, obviously, the web consists of only one site which can only be interacted with in one way. Duh.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[Anonymous Coward]

But HOW do they browse the web?

Do they use bookmarks? Do they write the address of the pages in the location bar? Do they use the search box? What search engines do they add to the search box? Do they change the home page?
Which buttons do they click the most? Which menu options are the most used? What options do they change?
How many tabs do they have open in average? How many addons do they install? etc.

There are LOTS of ways someone can "browse the web".

And to software engineers, that kind of information is HIGHLY sought after, and meticulously analyzed. It's one of the hottest topics in all of software development. Especially in ultra-competitive markets such as web browser development. Without it, a project can stagnate and die within a matter of months.

Re:How do people use Firefox?

[nospam007]

"Do they write the address of the pages in the location bar?"

Are you kidding? Bookmarks? You must be an older, wiser Gentleman from better days.
Nowadays kids, twens and the rest have Google as homepage (accidentally) and type in the search bar:
"Facebook login"
Each and every fucking day! Ditto for their other sites the visit regularly.
Every newbie I encountered the last couple of years does that!

"from the and-the-winner-is dept." - Well!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't keep us sitting at the edge of the seat like that, samzen! Tell us in the summary! Bah humbug.

So I clicked through to the article instead.. and it's no clearer on who 'won'. Did all 32 win? What kind of competition has -32- winners? The kind where everybody is a winner just for participating?

Worse yet... the article is -all blurb-. Here's something on data -visualization- and what do we get? Text! Just text!

Apparently you have to click on each of the mentioned submissions' titles to get to a page with more of the blurb and some -thumbnails- of the visualization.

Great.. so click the thumbnail to get the full-size image, right? Wrong! You get another page with a sized-down version of the full-size image. What The Fuck.

You have to click that sized-down image to get the full-size image.

So....
1. Who are the winners? If they say "All 32" I suggest they spend a little more time to narrow it down to a just 3 or a "Top 10" if they want to be part of that ludicrous internet phenomenon.
2. Why aren't these visualizations part of the main article? It's not like there's ads on the individual / image pages, so the usual scolding doesn't even apply.
3. Why oh why must I click three times to get from the main article to the full-size images? A blogging format / CMS is not always the appropriate tool to host these things, dammit.

Re:"from the and-the-winner-is dept." - Well!?

[PatPending]

Click the first link of TFS and you will learn:
The Grand Prize winner was James Fiedler
There were two Finalists.
There were five Honorable Mentions.

Re:"from the and-the-winner-is dept." - Well!?

[PatPending]

BTW: on the page pointed to by the first link of TFS, the individual results are just one-click away.

Gaming!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mozilla GameOn2010 competition judging opened today - dozens of games, many are crap - but a few are really worth looking at.

Linux Users

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it hard to believe that there are a total of 158 Linux firefox users. I'm obviously interpreting this statistic incorrectly, but it does look this way.