Categories: Contributor News

Live Chat on Firefox 3.5 Launch Day

During the Firefox 3.5 launch, the Mozilla Support community opened Live Chat extra hours to help people experiencing problems after the release. In all, we were able to answer over 1000 users with over 40 community members involved. Chatting with users right after a release lets us share feedback with the Quality Assurance and Launch teams, helping identify any new bugs that are affecting users. A number from the Mozilla Quality Assurance team were also available to assist with more difficult chats during launch week, and several were able to respond to chats when Live Chat was busy.

Overall, support during launch week was a huge success, and we’d like to thank everyone who helped make 3.5 the best Firefox release yet! Almost 50% fewer chat sessions were requested after Firefox 3.5 than after Firefox 3.0, which let us chat with over 90% of people requesting help. We were only able to chat with about half of users requesting help after Firefox 3.0, so this was a huge improvement! The top issues we saw following the release involved how to use new functionality in Firefox 3.5, add-on compatibility with 3.5, and a bug fixed in Firefox 3.5.1 that caused slow start-up times for some users. We regularly keep track of which issues are being seen often in Live Chat, and the full data for the 3.5 release is available in the SUMO Contributors Forum.

Since we have received positive feedback about the revised Live Chat schedule from the release, we have decided to keep some of the changes permanent. The changes have been announced in the Contributors Forum, and we would be glad to get more feedback about which times are best for the community. Since Live Chat requires users and helpers to be online at the same time, spreading out the times that Live Chat is open lets us reach as many people as possible.