We just made the switch to Firefox a lot better for millions of users

Sometimes taking a closer look at things that have remained unchanged for over a decade can be quite surprising — and the end result can help millions of people every year!

First, some background:
Firefox users on Windows have an extra item in the Help menu called For Internet Explorer Users.

This menu item leads to a document that helps users transitioning from Internet Explorer to Firefox in the same way the For Netscape Users menu item in IE helped users transition from Netscape. It was in Firefox 1.0, and the purpose of that menu item and the information it leads to hasn’t changed very much.

There have been some changes to Firefox Help since then.

• All support documentation was moved online to support.mozilla.com, allowing the community to update documentation without updating the software.
• We can track how users navigate support documentation and what they search for. Most notably, our article feedback system gives us insight on what users think of each article and what they expected to see.

One thing we have noticed is that most of the user comments on that article are about issues that have nothing to do with the article itself. Are visitors using the help-topic for its intended purpose? We decided to test that.

During the test, For Internet Explorer Users would point half of our users to a start page we created specifically for Firefox users on Windows. We would then compare the bounce rates, to see which destination users actually used. The result:

• Bounce rate for windows start page: 31%
• Bounce rate for For IE users: 77.5%

What this means is that our Windows start page is better tailored towards users clicking on the For Internet Explorer Users menu item.

Soon we will be making the menu item permanently point to the Windows start page. As a result, we will be helping far more of the 230,000 visitors to that article each week.