What Happens When an Opera User Downloads Firefox?

Ken Kovash

4 responses

Continuing our series of analysis based on the most recent edition of Funnelcake, we want to examine the experience of users when clicking the download button at mozilla.com – by browser.  In other words, what is the experience of a new Firefox user when he/she first arrives at our site while using Safari?  And is their experience any different than an IE user coming to mozilla.com and downloading Firefox?

First, let’s look at the breakdown of those clicking the Firefox download button (at the mozilla.com home page or main Firefox product page).

The picture above closely resembles the general internet population (i.e., worldwide market share).  I’m not sure if we would have expected to see something different.

Next, let’s examine the experience of each of the segments above.  Of those clicking the download button, how many receive the full data/file and how many don’t?

It doesn’t appear that there are any strong takeaways here.  The samples for Opera and “Other” are fairly small, so we should be cautious in drawing too many conclusions about the experience of those users.  Otherwise, the big three segments are relatively homogeneous.  One might expect the success of an existing Firefox user to be greater, but at the same time, there might be a higher percentage of accidental clicks by these users.

4 responses

  1. Michael Lefevre wrote on :

    “The samples for Opera and “Other” are fairly small, so we should be cautious in drawing too many conclusions about the experience of those users”

    Indeed. Sometimes when I read your posts, I think of all the times that I’m screwing up your stats by using multiple versions of multiple browsers, downloading on one platform to use on another, aborting a download which is going a bit slow and typing in the ftp URL, and whatever else I do. I have no idea where I saw it, but I seem to recall a survey or something that showed that a significant percentage of Firefox and Opera users are using multiple browsers…

    (Having mentioned it, I don’t know what kind of checks are in place for mirror speeds, but I do occasionally get bounced onto a Mozilla mirror which will only give me 20KB/s, and in that case I tend to abort and start again to get a faster download. For some people hitting a slow mirror might mean they become one of the incomplete download statistics and don’t try again…)

  2. Ian McKellar wrote on :

    The markets where Opera is popular might be markets with more poor internet connectivity than others. I’d guess that that’s part of the problem.

  3. Richard wrote on :

    I’ve just tried it with Opera. Immediately after clicking the link I get a blank page, which stays there.

    The progress indicator goes from 0-100% but that’s the only sign that anythings happening.

    Not particularly user-friendly in my opinion.

  4. KT wrote on :

    Interesting download success metrics.

    I think the takeaway is merely that Opera has huge share outside of North America and their requisite finicky connections. Mozilla server choices probably affect success also (i.e., I’m here in Sao Paulo, and when downloading FF in Opera, it goes to a Japan server, for some strange reason. There’s not one FF server in Brasil??).