As an organization, Mozilla has always championed transparency, and today, it’s taking this one step further by pulling back the curtains on its internal data for how many people regularly use Firefox and how they use the browser.
The new Firefox Public Data Report will include information about yearly and monthly active users, how many hours per day those users spend with Firefox, how long it takes users to upgrade to the latest version, how many Firefox users install add-ons, which add-ons are the most popular and more. That data can be segmented by region and by the top 10 countries where Firefox is most popular.
The data that’s available in the report today goes back just over a year and Mozilla plans to update the site at least once per week. Mozilla stresses that this data doesn’t come from some kind of real-time monitoring system but that it’s aggregated and anonymized data from a subset of its users. Indeed, if you are a Firefox user, you can simply go to about:telemetry and see what data is sent to Mozilla.
It doesn’t come as a surprise that this data shows a downward trend for monthly active Firefox users, which now measure about 250 million, down from well over 300 million last April.
You can find a few more examples of what kind of data Mozilla is publishing in the gallery below.
Right now, these new reports only focus on desktop users. Mozilla noted that getting data from mobile users is a bit harder, but that it plans to include data from mobile users in the next version of this tool. That hardware report hasn’t been updated since May, though.
This launch builds upon another Firefox data project at Mozilla that launched about two years ago, the Firefox Hardware Report, which provides some insights into what processors and graphics card Firefox users use, for example.
