{"id":1219,"date":"2009-10-12T15:57:06","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T22:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/?p=1219"},"modified":"2019-09-18T12:05:39","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T19:05:39","slug":"predicting-firefox-growth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/2009\/10\/12\/predicting-firefox-growth\/","title":{"rendered":"Predicting Firefox Growth"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Our Metrics intern, Eric Hergenrader, did some terrific work analyzing fluctuations in Firefox usage.\u00a0 Using a linear regression, he found that this summer&#8217;s decline in Firefox use was largely in line with expectations; a 2-3% decline in July and August is typical.\u00a0 In addition to seasonality, Eric found that three factors driving usage drops are weekends (-18%), holidays (-30%), and Firefox releases (-13.5%).<\/p>\n<p>Two months later, Eric&#8217;s model does a remarkable job predicting future usage.\u00a0 Below, I have plotted actual against predicted usage.\u00a0 The correlation between these two lines is remarkable.\u00a0 Since September, the average prediction was off by just 1.63%!<\/p>\n<p><a href='http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/Screen-shot-2009-10-12-at-2.47.16-PM.png'><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1232\" title=\"Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 2.47.16 PM\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/Screen-shot-2009-10-12-at-2.47.16-PM.png\" alt=\"Screen shot 2009-10-12 at 2.47.16 PM\" width=\"100%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/Screen-shot-2009-10-12-at-2.47.16-PM.png 837w, https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/Screen-shot-2009-10-12-at-2.47.16-PM-300x98.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 837px) 100vw, 837px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>To better understand daily growth variations, I created a heat map that visualizes month over month usage growth. Each cell contains one day&#8217;s growth rate over the same day of the week, 28 days earlier.<\/p>\n<p><a href='http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/heatmapv2.png'><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-1250\" title=\"heatmapv2\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/heatmapv2.png\" alt=\"heatmapv2\" width=\"100%\" srcset=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/heatmapv2.png 877w, https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/files\/2009\/10\/heatmapv2-300x47.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 877px) 100vw, 877px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some highlights:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Strongest growth occurs during Spring and Fall<\/li>\n<li>Periods of growth and decline are clustered<\/li>\n<li>Growth is outperforming predictions by 2.58%<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We must be careful not to overreach with our conclusions.\u00a0 We are working with a limited range of data and have likely missed significant confounding variables.\u00a0 That said&#8211;thanks to Eric&#8217;s work&#8211;we&#8217;re off to a great start.\u00a0 Please leave your thoughts and any suggestions on how to improve our projections in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Our Metrics intern, Eric Hergenrader, did some terrific work analyzing fluctuations in Firefox usage.\u00a0 Using a linear regression, he found that this summer&#8217;s decline in Firefox use was largely in line with expectations; a 2-3% decline in July and August &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/2009\/10\/12\/predicting-firefox-growth\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1557"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}