Over the past weeks, we’ve been sifting and analyzing the data from the Test Pilot tabs study, and working with Blake Cutler from the Mozilla Metrics team to generate graphs of interesting statistics about tab usage. Today we put up an analysis page showcasing a few of these graphs. There are many more tab-related statistics that we would like to visualize as well. We hope you’ll let us know what things you’re curious about!

We should be cautious about drawing conclusions too quickly from this data. For instance, just because it’s very common for someone to have three tabs open doesn’t mean that we need to start optimizing the browser for the three-tabs use case. These visualizations are just a starting point. We hope that looking at them will spark some ideas which can be turned into hypotheses. The next step is not to jump into designing interfaces, but rather to design experiments to test our hypotheses.

Third-party researchers have already begun using the aggregated data samples that we published to do their own analysis. Andy Edmonds at Surfmind.com has created some very cool-looking visualizations. He looks at the relationship between average tabs and maximum tabs and proposes an interesting hypothesis about two different classes of heavy tab users. Take a look!

Please visit the Test Pilot discussion group and share your thoughts about these visualizations, or about what other visualizations you would like to see!