This document summarizes the history and releases of Firefox from 2004 to 2016. It then discusses a study conducted with 27,267 Firefox users over 1 week to understand how to enhance the user experience. The study found that users engaged in more tab-related activity than bookmark use on average. It concludes more data needs to be collected from a more diverse sample over a longer period to better understand how users value bookmarks versus tabs and how device type impacts tab usage. The overall goal is to create a Firefox experience that evolves with the user.
12. 27,267
14,718
4,081
# of Firefox users
identified during the
study
# of users who used
Firefox during the study
# of users who
participated in the
survey
11
15. 14
Average New User Average Old User
26-35 years old 26-35 years oldMale Male
7/10
(skill level)
Chrome
(primary browser)
7/10
(skill level)
Chrome
(primary browser)
21. Conclusions
20
• Overall, there was more tab-related activity than bookmark use.
• Possible explanations:
• Bookmark use is related to pages users do not need immediately.
• Tab use is related to pages the user wants to keep track of immediately but
temporarily.
• Otherwise, bookmark use and tab use are unrelated and cannot be compared.
23. Find a more
diverse sample
Collect
current
data
Step 1: Address Prior Limitations
Increase
sample size
Increase
study length
22
24. Step 2: Dig Deeper
How do users
assign value to
bookmarks vs.
tabs?
How does
device type
affect tab use?
How frequently
do users go
back to
bookmarks?
User Survey
Follow-up
study of site
analytics
Longer
follow-up
user survey
23
That’s always been our mission here at Mozilla.
We are innovators; and Firefox, our premier product, is a product for the people.
So it’s important for each new version of Firefox to evolve with the people it was made for.
And it seems, we like to evolve with election cycles.
President Bush is reelected.
CD sales begin to decline and digital music downloads are becoming the main we consume music.
Social network Myspace officially launches.
The US makes history by electing Barack Obama.
Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and it’s parodies are blowing up (a young) YouTube.
iPhones are revolutionizing the mobile market.
Mozilla sets a Guinness World Record for number of Firefox 3 downloads in one day.
The US votes President Obama in for a second term.
Tablets are officially a thing (less weird more norm).
Mozilla prepares for the release of Firefox for a mobile device
One of the most intense elections in recent history.
Media download services are slowly being eclipsed by convenient streaming
“Chance the Rapper's 'Coloring Book' to be the 1st Streaming-Exclusive Album to Chart on Billboard 200”
Tech News just announces the demise of Internet Explorer… “331 Million users moved to other browsers”.
“Firefox was steadily in decline for some time… only to bounce back in the past two months”.
But bouncing back is not enough. Which brings us to the Business Problem
Chrome has been steadily picking up steam and taking some of our users with them
Firefox should work the way you do.
We’ve already overhauled the interface.
But there are 2 basic features that some of my colleagues would like to take a deeper look at…
Bookmarks and Tabs
Had technical difficulties with pgadmin when trying to run the bookmark distribution query.
Had technical difficulties with pgadmin when trying to run the median tabs query.
The data is from 2010. We are in 2016.
The study was only 1 week long. Which caused our sample size to be relatively small.
15% of the users identified participated in the survey.
91% of them were male
94% of them were Windows users
