For a few days now, we’ve been noting that the Firefox 3.6 release went smoother than 3.5. Now we can quantify it. By looking at the amount of traffic to SUMO, we expect a spike every time there’s a release — especially if there are issues that affect a large number of users.

The following chart shows number of daily unique visitors for release day and 3 days after each release relative to the exact same figure for a week prior. The blue band represents the mean of the data for non-release days ±1 SD.

As you can see, we got a large increase in traffic from the 2.0>3.0.1 major update and the 3.5 release. (Since 3.0 was the first Firefox version to link to SUMO for help, there was not much SUMO traffic prior to 3.0 and the spike around the 3.0 release was over 500%). However, the recent 3.6 release resulted in a significantly smaller traffic jump. This suggests that there were fewer major issues around the 3.6 release — Firefox 3.6 is definitely the best Firefox yet.

Of course, the baseline daily unique visitor count has increased from 180,000 after the 3.0 release to around 400,000 before 3.5 to over 750,000 before the 3.6 release. So while the Firefox developer, QA, release engineering and support teams have been doing a great job making sure these releases are smoother and smoother, we are still getting a lot of traffic and we can still use your help! Learn how here.

Over the past quarter, there has been an effort with Firefox Support around working closer with everyone in the Mozilla community and acting as a bridge between the Mozilla community and the more mainstream segment of Firefox users.  We blogged earlier about some of the ways that we can provide feedback to Firefox developers, QA and other members of the Mozilla community. This blog post will focus on some concrete examples of how this close relationship worked in the wake of Firefox 3.5.

Norton toolbar disabled in Firefox 3.5

Symantec did not have the Norton toolbar updated in advance of the Firefox 3.5 push so many users who updated found themselves without a key part of their browser.  This understandably upset many Firefox users who interpreted the “Norton toolbar is disabled” message as that they were no longer safe online.

In this instance, a close collaboration with the QA, Add-ons and Firefox team alerted us that this may be a big deal so we got a knowledge base article written right away in advance of the push.  Furthermore, with a downloadable patch from Norton, we were able to give these Firefox users a workaround and help make sure that their Firefox 3.5 upgrade went as smoothly as possible.

Lost bookmarks when upgrading

When the upgrade to 3.5 offer was popped up to all 3.0 users, we suddenly noticed a significant increase in the number of users reporting that some or all of their bookmarks were missing.  In addition to helping users restore their bookmarks and updating KB articles, we worked closely with the Firefox team to figure out the cause.  After collecting files from willing users and doing some detective work in conjunction with affected users, we managed to figure out that these users were actually getting reverted to bookmarks from Firefox 2.  This led to a quick patch that rolled out in the next update of Firefox.

What’s really great is how quickly we went from discovering a problem through our forums and live chat into putting out a patch that potentially helped millions of Firefox users who’ve updated since.  This loop of getting information from users and turning that into fixes for users is what makes collaboration with the greater Mozilla community so rewarding and why it’s so important.

Problems caused by extensions, plugins and third party software

Being able to work with users experiencing a problem, SUMO also plays a role in identifying extensions, plugins and third party programs that can issues for users.  For example, when a number of users complained about not being able to use the right mouse button in Firefox 3.5, we narrowed down that Yahoo Toolbar versions older than 2.0 were the cause.  Just this week, SUMO was one of the first places that users reported that AVG was marking Firefox as a trojan.  Very quickly, we got a KB article up and within 24 hours, Tomcat in Mozilla’s QA group was able to work with AVG and get updated virus definitions pushed.

Crashes

In addition to the above, we’ve been working on incorporating information about top crashes into the knowledge base and helping connect the developers working on crashes with users experiencing them.  As part of that we had a recent sprint to write KB articles for the 30 top crashes and are constantly monitoring new topcrashes.  In the upcoming quarter, we hope to really ramp up this effort and make it even faster to get crashed diagnosed or reproduced so they can be fixed.

In general, working closely with support, not only benefits the 4 million SUMO visitors a week, it can also make the Firefox experience better for the 300 million Firefox users out there.

What you can do to help

As a member of the Mozilla community, there are a couple things that you can do to help us work better together.

1. Work on, triage or help reproduce common-issue+ bugs. We’re using the common-issue+ keyword to mark issues that we see a lot on support.  Getting activity on those bugs helps complete the loop from user via SUMO back to improving the experience for users.
2. Mark commonly-duped bugs with the common-issue? keyword. We may not spot every issue or in some cases, the symptoms of a bug are generic and we may not realize they’re distinct from another bug.  Marking a bug with the common-issue? keyword lets us know to pay specific attention to an issue and see if it’s actually happening to users who show up on SUMO.
3. Help with user support.  Working with users relies on having community members answer questions on our support forums and live chat service.  It’s really easy to get started and the more user questions we answer, the more information we can feed back to the larger Mozilla community.

The full slides for a brownbag Cheng hosted on this topic can be found here.  If you have more ideas for how SUMO can work better with you or other feedback, please let us know in the comments below, in the #sumo IRC channel or via email.

Support is one of the top and most discoverable ways that Firefox users can give feedback about their experiences with Firefox. While the primary focus of Firefox Support will always be make sure users have the best possible experience with Firefox (and the web), the SUMO project tracks trends and provides insights about our user base to the greater Mozilla community.

Common user questions

The primary thing we track at SUMO is commonly asked questions and commonly encountered issues. Not only does this help guide the support community, it also helps Firefox developers know what are some of the major pain points for our users. A bug that may not seem like a big deal can actually be a top support issue because it causes confusion or “feels wrong” to our users. Because support works so closely with users in the forum and on live chat, we’re often able to troubleshoot a problem, working with the user to identify the extension, plugin or setting responsible. This can help get traction on bugs where the development or QA teams are unable to reproduce. There will be a followup blog post discussing the feedback that SUMO has provided around common issues during the 3.5 launch.

Improving messaging and websites

Visitors to support are often not the most technically savvy, and in many cases are new to Firefox or the web. Since support volunteers work daily with these users, we often have a good feel for what kinds of messaging works and what can be confusing for these users. Over the past quarter, we’ve been providing feedback to the marketing team at Mozilla working on education efforts. This has helped them figure out which Firefox features to explain or clarify, for example.

A number of Mozilla webpages also link to SUMO. By tracking where these users go on SUMO, we can help figure out what questions people visiting those pages may have and provide feedback about how to improve those pages for better user retention. In particular, we’ve been tracking traffic from the Firefox download page to see if we can help remove roadblocks that new Firefox users may face that may prevent them from getting started successfully with their new browser.

Giving feedback on usage patterns and interface

Whenever there are changes to the Firefox interface, people who are used to a feature working in a certain way or looking like a certain thing get confused and come to support. For example, while most people familiar with computers will use keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste, many visitors to SUMO have trouble with that and will instead use the context menu or the menu bar. Similarly, the Send Link feature is widely used and people often come to SUMO when it doesn’t work as expected rather than just copying and pasting a URL to an email. On the other hand, there are features we don’t hear much about. For example, the Delete option in the Edit menu isn’t much used. SUMO has been able to provide some initial feedback to the developers working on user interface in Firefox 3.7 as they make decisions about how to streamline the future of Firefox.

These are just some of the ways that SUMO can help you learn about the Firefox user base. As we move forward, we’ll be looking for more ways we can use our insights to facilitate a closer working relationship between developers and teams at Mozilla and our users which everyone in the community can benefit from.

More importantly, as a resource for the community, we can help you get answers to any user and usage questions you might have about Firefox. Whether you’re localizing support articles on SUMO, running an independently hosted local support site, or if you work with QA, engineering or anywhere else, we’d love to help you. Just let us know what you need and we’ll do our best to provide answers.