Mozilla Labs » Test Pilot

Welcome!

Test Pilot Blog

Test Pilot 0.3 and a new study!
4. Nov 2009
jinghua zhang

We are excited to give an update on the recent progress that we’ve made for the Test Pilot program.

Since we announced the first study of Test Pilot, Tab Open/Close, about two months ago, we have received more than 7,000 data submissions from around the world, providing invaluable data into how you use tabs in your daily Web browsing. We’ve published some analysis we of this data. We’ve seen the thoughts you’ve shared about it via the discussion group and twitter . We’ve seen people use the aggregated data samples that we published to do their own analysis. The level of interest and participation in the Test Pilot community is very encouraging to us. We hope to continue delivering studies that are interesting and meaningful to both the product team and the public. Thanks for your participation, and keep it coming!

Test Pilot 0.3

Download!

One of the problems with the Test Pilot extension so far has been that we’ve needed to release a new version of the extension every time we wanted to add a new experiment or survey, or even in order to fix a minor bug. And every time we released a new version, users had to download it, then restart Firefox; an annoyance that we’d rather not force on people.

The new release of the Test Pilot extension, version 0.3, has been rewritten from the ground up to avoid this problem. It is now based on the same technology as Jetpack, which enables it to automatically retrieve new experiments and improvements to existing experiments, without asking you to download anything or restart Firefox.

Our policy of giving pilots control over their own data is the same as it has always been: You can still quit a study at any time, you can still review all collected data before you send it, and you can still choose not to submit the data when a study ends. The only thing that’s different is that we can now update an experiment already in progress.

A Week in the Life of a Browser

Many pilots have asked what is the next study, and here it comes: A Week in the Life of a Browser!

In recent years, people spend more and more time on the Web to work, to organize their daily lives, to entertain themselves and to socialize with friends. Is Firefox robust enough to support these activities smoothly all the time?

For this study, which we will be launching at the beginning of December, we would like to explore what a browser does to facilitate its user using the Web through a year. We will periodically collect your usage information about the browser for a week and run the same study again every 60 days. The main goal is to explore if the browser has been used differently over time, which may help us design a better product that works adaptively. This study is inspired by several test proposals that we received in the past months: proposals for tests of Overall Performance , Memory Usage, and Window Metrics.

This is a periodical study; pilots can choose to opt in or out of the study at any time. Each study phase is independent and equally important to us. Whether you choose to participate for the whole year, or only for a single week, the data that you share is extremely valuable. Please read the details about the study, and please visit the Test Pilot discussion group to share your thoughts if you have questions about this study.