{"id":20,"date":"2008-01-03T10:25:35","date_gmt":"2008-01-03T17:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/2008\/01\/03\/what-factors-affect-firefox-usage\/"},"modified":"2019-09-18T12:07:16","modified_gmt":"2019-09-18T19:07:16","slug":"what-factors-affect-firefox-usage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/2008\/01\/03\/what-factors-affect-firefox-usage\/","title":{"rendered":"What factors affect Firefox usage?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few months ago, we provided some initial analysis about how Firefox usage <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/2007\/10\/10\/firefox-usage-%e2%80%93-does-the-day-of-week-have-an-effect\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">varies by day of the week<\/a> (e.g., Wednesday vs. Saturday).  We&#8217;ve since attempted to improve upon that analysis by making sure we&#8217;re accounting for everything in our statistical equation, allowing us to correctly isolate certain effects.  For example, there is typically a significant drop-off in usage on holidays.  In this case, we want to tease out the single effect of a day being a holiday, while also not allowing holidays to influence the other effects that we&#8217;re trying to measure (e.g., day of the week). Moreover, our numbers fluctuate in the days immediately following a Firefox release.  This is in no way related to an actual change in usage by Firefox users; it&#8217;s attributable to the interaction of our updates with our security ping process (described <a href=\"http:\/\/john.jubjubs.net\/2007\/11\/27\/mozilla-firefox-market-share\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>), but we still have to be cognizant of this factor while trying to understand our active daily user numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Given these observable variables, our regression equation looks like:<\/p>\n<p>Active Daily Users = \u03b1 + \u03b21dayofweek + \u03b22month + \u03b23holiday + \u03b24daysafterupdate + \u03b5<\/p>\n<p>Are there any variables that we&#8217;re forgetting about on the right hand side of that equation?  In other words, is there anything you&#8217;d expect to affect the number of active daily Firefox users that we also need to be thinking about (or that could be affecting the four variables we&#8217;re already including)?<\/p>\n<p>The output for our regression equation is below.  It uses our active daily user numbers from 2007 (number of instances = 327) and the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Coefficient_of_determination\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">R-squared<\/a> is 0.95.  The percentages are the regression coefficients relative to the constant (34.3 million).<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/wiki.mozilla.org\/images\/a\/ad\/Dayofweek2.png\" height=\"263\" width=\"349\" \/><\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;d like to continue improving upon this analysis in the future; if you have any feedback, we&#8217;re all ears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few months ago, we provided some initial analysis about how Firefox usage varies by day of the week (e.g., Wednesday vs. Saturday). We&#8217;ve since attempted to improve upon that analysis by making sure we&#8217;re accounting for everything in our &hellip; <a class=\"go\" href=\"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/2008\/01\/03\/what-factors-affect-firefox-usage\/\">Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"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\/20"}],"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\/60"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/metrics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}