Support/Surveys/Babylon-Toolbar
According to web traffic data for support.mozilla.com, one of the top visited articles on SUMO is linked from the Babylon toolbar, so we ran a short survey of visitors to that article to find out why users download the toolbar.
Summary Results
Out of 496 Firefox Users who have the Babylon toolbar and answered to our survey:
- 42% responded that they "don't want the toolbar"
- 16% wanted it because of the Translation capabilities
- 16% because of the Radio features.
- 12% want the toolbar for games.
- 6% want the toolbar for Videos.
- 2% decided to install it to enhance Downloads.
- 7% have other diverse reasons like managing bookmarks, Facebook, etc.
42% of users who have this toolbar don't want it, but the percentage goes up to 54% if we add the respondents that "are not sure about having the toolbar installed" as detailed below.
From content in SUMO's forum we know that the Babylon toolbar is a piece of software that users are trying to remove, and this survey indicates that is because a high percentage installed it unintentionally and then found their search hijacked.
In addition, the uninstallation process is not obvious as shown by all the threads that are generated around the topic[1]. From the crash reports we also have some indications about how this type of toolbar impacts performance negatively. See Bug 688895 and Bug 715757. Those users who do intend to install the Babylon toolbar mainly do so for the translation feature. This matches data gathered from users who migrate to Chrome because they want the Translation feature that used to be provided by the Google Toolbar and now only available in Google Chrome. See http://bit.ly/moz-critical for the complete research report contracted by Patrick Finch and David Tenser.
Survey Details
We ran the survey of visitors to the Windows Media Player SUMO article because 90+% of visitors to that article come from the Babylon toolbar: [2]. The remaining 10% of visitors come to the article from other Montiera toolbars as we can see here. This traffic is because the toolbar offers a link to our article if the user doesn't have the Windows Media Player installed. The goal of the survey was twofold:
- To determine whether visitors are looking for how to install the Windows Media Player
- To determine why users are installing the Babylon toolbar
During the 29th of February we ran the survey with 3 simple questions:
- What were you expecting on this site?
- A text entry field for the answer was provided
- Do you have a toolbar? (Supported by a visual aid to help them understand what a toolbar is)
- Yes
- No
- I'm not sure
- If Yes - Why did you install it?
- Translation Features
- Radio Features
- I didn't want it
- Other Features (with a text entry field for the answer)
Results Details
In the 24 hours that the survey was shown, 20338 visitors viewed it and 1007 answered it. Here are the results:
- 609 had the toolbar installed
- 237 say they don't have the toolbar
- 161 are not sure if they have the toolbar
We can assume that the ratio doesn't match the referrer information because users coming from the Firefox chrome (or toolbars) have a faster bounce (i.e. they close the tab that is opened seconds after without time to read the content) and therefore will have a lower potential to answer the survey. We could also assume that a high perentage of the 16% of users that are not sure about having the toolbar have it installed. From the group who has the toolbar we have a sample of 496 users who gave us more information about the reasons why they installed it:
- 39% don't want it.
- 15% wanted it because of the Translation capabilities
- 13% because of the Radio features.
- 32% mentioned others and gave us other reasons.
If we evaluate the other reasons, we found that the majority of them are because of games and video downloaders but there's also a group of people that mentions that it was "mandatory" or some other software requested to install it, indicating that they don't really want it. In a similar fashion, the game sites that are mentioned push for these toolbars to be installed while they don't add benefits to the game. Aggregating the tabulated data from the "Others" category to the previous group we have a richer picture:
- 42% don't want it.
- 16% wanted it because of the Translation capabilities
- 16% because of the Radio features.
- 12% want the toolbar for games.
- 6% want the toolbar for Videos.
- 2% decided to install it to enhance Downloads.
- 7% have other diverse reasons like managing bookmarks, Facebook, etc.
