Spectator

Problem Statement

The Firefox team needs more data about how users actually use Firefox in the field.

Proposal

Although, we can obtain this data through detailed user studies. A more scalable solution is to technically instrument the browser to collect anonymous usability information and submit to a central site. A web application would aggregate this information into actionable summaries.

Details

Subject Areas

There are numerous metrics that could be collected. For the initial build of this system, we will focus on feature use. In particular, the following questions:

Feature Use

• How many times is the search box used?
• Which search is being used?
• How many extensions do people use?
• Addons v. other extension distributors
• Number of themes, using a theme?
• How many bookmarks by type?
• How many pop-ups are blocked?
• How many tabs are used?

Technical Implementation

This project can be divided into several components:

Data Collection Service

The data collection service aggregates the data and uploads it to the collection server. Before uploading data, a manifest file will be fetched from the server to control which items will be uploaded. This allows us to tweak the volume of data collected as desired, without client-side changes.

Collection Service Design

Data Collectors

Data collectors will hook in at a variety of locations in the backend and frontend. Each collector submits events to the collection service, where each event can contain collector-specific key/value pairs.

Data Collector Design

Server Infrastructure

The server is responsible for storing and providing a clean interface to the data.

Server Design