We recently reinitiated our Funnelcake experiment on November 18th from 00:00:00 – 23:59:59 PST.  As you may recall from last year’s effort, we:

• introduced the technical aspects behind it
• reviewed several key findings (e.g., the Firefox “Funnel Factor”)
• highlighted some longer-term implications

Before we soon publish our latest findings, I want to take an opportunity to briefly articulate why Funnelcake is important within the Mozilla community.  Generally, we have just about zero visibility into the experience of new users of Firefox.  For example, did a new user enjoy a happy download and install process? did he/she continue to be satisfied a month later, six months later?

Funnelcake doesn’t specifically relate the attitudes of new Firefox users, but it does start to provide some structure around the answers to those questions.  Having some information around the potential pain points of new Firefox users, along with how such users behave (e.g., are they satisfied?) over a long period of time, is important knowledge not simply for marketers or statisticians, but for the general online population as a whole and for the Mozilla community in particular.