Mozilla Add-ons Community Blog
Categories: developers end users releases

Improved Stats Dashboard and Ajax Search Results

20 responses

Hello everyone! My name is Amy and this is my second week on the AMO team as an Add-ons Community Manager. I’m here to make sure you have a great experience on AMO, so feel free to send me feedback or ask questions. If I don’t have the answer, I will try to track down someone who does!

It’s push day, and there are two new features we’d like to highlight:

Improved Stats Dashboard

The dashboard is now faster, easier to use, and better looking:

  • More data at a glance: we added three charts displaying popular stats that used to require multiple clicks to reach—most-used applications, most-used languages, and most-used OSes.
  • Better performance: we migrated the dashboard from PHP to Python as part of a larger AMO initiative, and the move has improved load times. We focused on moving the major features, and may migrate more features in upcoming releases. If there is a feature in the old dashboard that you think is critical and it isn’t available in the new dashboard, please let us know.
  • Redesigned interface: we updated the look and feel of the dashboard to make it more visually pleasing and easier to read.

See the improvements in action here.

Ajax Search Results

We’ve made it faster and easier to page through search results using Ajax. Rather than load new pages as you browse through results, new results are shown in-line.

  • Auto-detect filtering: we automatically detect your Firefox version and operating system and show you the filtered results.
  • Collapsible sidebar facets: choose additional filtering parameters in the sidebar and see new results in-line.
  • Shortcut keys: on any search results page, simply use your left and right arrow keys to toggle between pages.

See the search results page in action here.

Please give the new features a spin and let us know what you think!

20 comments on “Improved Stats Dashboard and Ajax Search Results”

  1. Pavel Cvrček wrote on

    Hi Amy, welcome. Just small suggestion. When you link to same page on AMO please remove language info (“en-US”) from URL. There are some AMO localizations. Thanks!

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Thanks for pointing that out–the blog is updated.

  2. Bradley Rosenfeld wrote on

    Nice!

    The statistics page for my addon (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-this/statistics/?last=30) is so much more useful for viewing the stats. Much easier to understand.

  3. Tony Mechelynck wrote on

    ah, interesting.

    For several addons I get “Permission denied”. Well, I suppose it’s the author’s right not to make an addon’s stats public, but it deprives us of some comparison points.

    I notice a weekly cycle in “daily users” with a Friday-Saturday (but not Sunday) low on practically all addons. The extremely marked low “daily users” on August 30 for all addons is perhaps an artefact?

    The huge predominance of Windows is stunning — and maybe a little depressing. With a few exceptions though: It’s All Text, 34% Linux; Bugmail, slightly more Linux than Windows users (both in 90 days).

    For ChatZilla I notice a very significant presence of SeaMonkey in the “Applications” pie chart. That’s where having it bundled with the app makes a difference. (Venkman’s and DOM Inspector’s stats are “private” so I cannot compare.)

    1. patrickjdempsey wrote on

      For those of us who have been tracking usage statistics for our addons for a few years now, the general trend is that Saturdays always have the lowest usage of the week and Wednesday almost always have the highest. There’s different ways to calculate averages, I’d love to see Mozilla switch to *median* instead of *mean* for these statistics. For the example: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/translate-this/statistics/?last=30 the average daily users for Nov6-Nov12 is: 29,526 while the median value for that week is: 30608. Or instead of median, if we threw out Saturday and Sunday as outliers, the average mean for the remaining 5 days is pretty close to the median: 30539.

  4. jonathan wrote on

    Please considering redirecting old dashboard URLs (e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/statistics/addon/54035) to the newer ones (e.g. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gmail-conversation-view/statistics/?last=30). Thanks 🙂

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Hi Jonathan, we will do this in the next week or two, when we are certain that the new dashboard is working smoothly.

  5. cfl wrote on

    Really nice/useful. I do miss the direct links (when logged in) to statistics for my other add-ons. And had to google to find the dashboard home. These aren’t really /critical/, but they were certainly useful.

    Love the new inline search overall. Couple of times it seemed to update the results while I was mousing-over the result list, after having seen the one I want (which then either disappeared or moved in the list). Bug? Can’t seem to reproduce it though.

    1. Potch wrote on

      We’ll be adding those back in- easy to do, and useful for developers.

  6. onemen wrote on

    the numbers that i see for Top Applications are wrong
    can we quarry for more info ?
    for example daily users that uses version X and Application Y
    or Version X and Language Z …

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Hi onemen, we are aware of this issue and we’re looking into it.

  7. Online-News-Center wrote on

    Oh this looks and sounds really great, but I have to test it before say more 😉

  8. SilverWave wrote on

    Much better 🙂

    The graph for sources looks broken though:

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hack-the-web/statistics/downloads/sources/?last=30

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Hi SilverWave, this is how we currently display gaps in data, and we are looking into improving this.

  9. SilverWave wrote on

    I think It would be helpful to have:
    Daily Users (n) Daily Download (n)

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hack-the-web/statistics/?last=30

    e.g.
    Statistics for HackTheWeb: Daily Users (n) Daily Download (n)

  10. Josh wrote on

    Hi Amy good luck!
    The new statistics eashboard is amazing and an eye opener – thanks for a great job done well!

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Thanks Josh 🙂

  11. Mingyi Liu wrote on

    Hi Amy, I have a question: I noticed that for all 4 of my addons, the graph shows that around Oct. 10 or so the growth for daily users started slowing even though downloads did not (in 2 cases, the downloads increased). I wonder if the new chart is also using a different way of counting the # of daily users? Thanks!

    1. Amy Tsay wrote on

      Hi Mingyi, I will email you for more details…

  12. Roger Mercier wrote on

    While I wish I had more time to assist in the development team for Firefox, my work schedule does not permit it at this time. With the research that I do, having an icon to stop an unwanted download or refresh a page that one in reading are very helpful in my line of work.
    Is there anyway to get these icons back to add to my navigation toolbar?

    Thanks for your help

    Roger Mercier