Mozilla wants users to take part in a survey about browser features
Direct link: https://qsurvey.mozilla.com/s3/413b49c8ae9e
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/your-feedback-matters-take-our-survey-on-browser-features/td-p/64040Open linkView original on lemm.ee317
Comments129
How much AI do you want in your browser:
( ) None
( ) Zero
( ) I want my browser to automatically close any page that mentions AI
Which of these options do you prefer:
( ) having an AI assistant integrated into the browser
( ) getting kicked in the balls by elon musk
A genuinely tough decision
Well, getting kicked in the balls is a one-time affair, and I'm done having kids anyway, so I'd go with that.
More like
2x slower browser
AI
that question seemed directly made by some software dev that shares my opinion lol
i picked 2x slower browser over ai because at least if it is gonna be slower im not gonna be harassed by some amalgamation of every incel shitpost on the Internet
What country do you live in: Germany, United States, Brazil, other
What? Weird survey options.
Data retention would be my guess.
could just be the countries with the most users or where they've seen a recent trend, up or down, in local market share.
I didn't see that question, but all 3 of those countries seem to rank pretty high on the country demographics for FOSS that I've seen (as in when individual FOSS projects do demographics surveys of their users)
It has always been
Someone being funny? BUG
i don’t like how they used "want least", it means three very different things:
That's why they did it in sets of three. They could just give every user a blank text box for every option, but doing it this way makes it far easier to analyze the data in bulk.
yea, but that gives you less info
this way, you can’t really differentiate from a feature that people want, but not as a priority, VS a feature that people don’t want ever
And there's no way to relate preference between features, at least in my case. I had one question that I entered "2x faster performance" as most want, and the next question was "2x slower performance," but there was another crappy option in the same list that I also don't want, so if I don't pick "2x slower performance" as least want, what signal does that send?
I hope it all comes out in the wash, but honestly, I would've preferred a big list of all of the features with 4 options:
I think I would've entered about even numbers of things for each category. They could even limit "really want" to top three or something.
It makes the survey easier to complete by users in small steps. Huge surveys scare users away.
The survey design accounts for this. See https://lemm.ee/comment/13835466.
Is that a joke?
Control question probably, to check if you actually read the questions.
I forgot those exist and interpreted it as "Would you sacrifice performance for one of these features?"
Am I stupid?
I also thought it was a feature vs performance question. How can it be used as a control question?
By overestimating users' intelligence... classic blunder, really. 🧐
I jest, I've no idea.
Haha!
Mozilla might be insane
That's how I treated it too. I took it at face value.
I have modern hardware so I don't care too much about browser performance. All browsers perform well on my hardware. Obviously some are more lightweight and optimised, but I have no doubts about my ability to comfortably browse the web on my hardware, so all the performance questions I tended to rank in the middle (ie not most or least important) as I don't tend to notice browser performance.
lol, yeah. 👍
I was doing a political poll just the other day and the third or fourth question was a color question like: “Which of the following is associated most with a ripe banana?”
Eh, how ripe are we talking?
I debated because I really disliked another option in there (I think it was split-screen for AI or something stupid) and it felt like it was designed to make me not rank something else I didn't like as least desired.
For me that was together with
So I don't really care how slow the browser is, as long as it doesn't have an AI "assistant" that is monitoring my browser usage
I wouldn't mind an AI assistant, as long as it's fully local.
But why? If you want that, you can just have it outside of your browser. Or maybe get an extension that works with an AI assistant on your machine.
I honestly don't care either way about an AI assistant. I don't intend to use it, so I'd much rather their efforts be spent elsewhere.
Why would you want that in a browser? We have LLMs you can run local.
Can you let me have my own preferences? Am I allowed?
Not at the cost of my experience. It should be a optional feature if anything
Agreed. If you don't want to use it it should just stay out of the way.
Yup, I stuck that as "least want." I already marked "2x faster performance" as "most want" on another question, so hopefully it all shakes out in the end.
You clearly missed the point about "privacy respecting." It will only share data with Meta, Google and the US government.
Oh, what a deal...
Wait, I swear mine said twice as fast. Well I guess I got filtered then. Lol
There were both
I had both.
It's an Inferred importance method, as other users have commented it is likely that there are some calibration metrics in there. MaxDiff is the name of the approach if you want to check out more.
Mozilla is weighting on the data. They found people love AI more than a slow browser.
Everyone's here complaining about the randomised questions when I'm just curious why location options are "Germany", " Brazil", "USA", or " Somewhere we don't care about".
Those are simply the most significant Firefox user bases.
I wonder what percentage of people chose "Least important" for "Do you want another fucking annoying pointless AI assistant?"
I hope all of them. If you use firefox you are probably in the minority that has at peast some idea of how unnecessary those are.
from this comment and the reply, I'm guessing at least 3.
You folks are really exaggerating. How is this survey weird? The random questions in groups of 3 make it easy to compare 3 features instead of rating 60 different features by most wanted to least wanted. In aggregate from thousands of replies, they can sort all answers.
I feel like most of these people were way over analyzing the questions. No reason to look for in depth meaning of possible answers, just answer them and take them at face value.
It's the "most wanted" language. I don't blame common folks associating "most wanted" with "I want this!" when in fact they don't mean it.
But the language is clear. From these 3 features, choose the one you want the most and the one you want the least 🤔
The language is not clear.
" As a vegetarian, which of these three options you want the least and which you want the most? You MUST choose to continue:
"
You are saying that a reasonable person (vegetarian in this case, and disclaimer: I am not vegetarian) would say "well, I want a kick in the balls the least, so I'll choose that. Now, fuck, I HATE chicken sandwiches and I HATE pork sandwiches. They both make me puke. But if I have to choose, I guess I'll go for the chicken sandwich. Hey pollster, I want the chicken sandwich the most." And the pollster writes "Chester wants the chicken sandwich the most." Yeah, very clear.
That's the typical "if you were in a deserted island" scenario that vegetarians and vegans are very familiar with. Given those 3 options:
1 > 2 > 3
You're missing the point, but that's fine. I'm in a good mood today, so I'll stop things here. Let's talk about something else.
How's your day going?
They could've just said "Rank the features from one to three accordibg to how much you like it". This seems unneccessarily more confusing. It isn't all that cobfusing, but it is an odd way to formulate the question.
That's already suggestive. What if you want none of them, and strongly so?
If you hate or love them all equally, I guess a random score is fine.
The person evaluating the poll will take away "person likes option 1 most" not "person absolutely wants none of these in their browser, ever". That's the issue. You should not phrase questions in a way that assumes parts of the answer, at least not if you want useful results.
A better way would have been to let us rate features 0 to 10 and just accept if people thought their feature ideas are all shit.
It's not a better way to rate from 0 to 10. It takes way more effort from the user and leads to more people dropping out. And in the end, the result is the same in aggregate. If your opinion is popular, more people will vote like you because the sets of 3 are random. In a survey of thousands, individual opinions don't matter. No one is going to evaluate the answers one by one.
Then make it 0 to 3 or 0 to 1 for all I care. You missed the point, which is: If I want or don't want feature A doesn't influence if I want or don't want feature B, and linking the two distorts the results of the poll.
Not if you include the human factor of the decision maker, who can twist "wanted less" into "still wanted a bit" as a justification if they want a certain feature for different reasons than user benefit (like, say, a "privacy friendly" but indeed not at all privacy friendly mechanism to give data to add networks). That doesn't fly with "0 points".
Do they publish any of the data from these surveys or use it as an excuse to remove more useful features?
"We listen to our community, so now we're removing
about: configaccess from stable desktop builds to match the mobile version to provide uniform builds, making problems easier to replicate and also provide better security for all. Please use beta or nightly builds for tinkering."Product managers know what KPI's they want to improve, and its almost never survey sentiment results. The survey will be used to justify projects that improve the KPIs they already have. Best case scenario it helps them choose what to work on first, worst case (and most likely) it doesn't matter what the survey says - it's engineered to justify a pet project.
i.e. Straight out of "how to lie with statistics" - Would you rather drink bleach or add in browser advertisements based on privacy respecting AI categorization of you browsing behavior? ..... The people have spoken and they OVERWHELMINGLY want more monetization in their browser.
Duh. I'd rather drink bleach.
Honestly it the world gets bad enough it could get that extreme...
"We found that users wanted AI over a 2x slower browser"
Damn, i was hoping for them to make it slower!
This is one of the weirder surveys I've ever taken, I hope they know what they're doing.
They have lot there minds just like the entire tech industry
When looking for a new web browser, which feature would you prefer most and which would you prefer least?
I don't want any of those. Can't we just have a browser that filters all of the popups, junk and advertising?
Nope. You can't progress through the survey without picking one thing you really don't want and at least one of two things you couldn't give a shit less about.
This one was kinda oof
They needed to have something that might be less appealing than an AI assistant
Oh. I had different sets. I had all 3 options but not against each other. So it seems they're randomized.
Edit: hadn't read the other replies. People have already figured that out, it seems.
You'd rather have yours twice as slow than a feature you could probably disable? Weird blind hate ngl
I dont want any AI built into my browser. The speed would not be that noticeable anyway as it is quite fast rn.
I think that's a good way of measuring "bullshit" in tge surver. The only problem is that you get just one of these questionnaires and a bunch of other questions for the entire survey
Bring back PWA!!
Sadly, they're probably thinking mobile.
Yeah, some of these questions made more sense for mobile than desktop. For example, I want to split tabs on desktop, but I don't on mobile. Likewise, I don't really care about PWAs on mobile (there's usually an app with a better experience), but I do care on desktop because that isn't a thing on my system (Linux).
I think it would've been better had they broken them into groups for mobile and desktop.
Desktop PWAs are easy as you can just create a shortcut
Yup. A lot of services don't offer official apps on Linux, so I rely on webpages.
Nope. A PWA gives you a browser window with no menu bars and the icon of the age vs the browser. It's treated as a separate entity in your start bar for task switching.
Many of us still use Chromium for that one feature, while using Firefox for everything else.
You can do that with command line arguments
Not with FF. Well, not without massive CSS app customization and separate profiles which is not officially supported.
Yes you can. Try running Firefox --help
No, you cannot. There have been tickets open about this for ages. You are talking about opening a URL, not a PWA.
PWAs were a feature I marked "want least". I don't like a cluttered home screen, I'd much rather just use bookmarks.
The reason I mention PWA for desktop is very different from mobile, but for either, a PWA can live anywhere, it's just a menu less browser with the site's icon vs the firefox one. Handy for sites with no apps that you want to be able to task switch independently for. They dont have to be on a home screen or desktop.
Granted, the wording of the question would make one think so.
Yes, it's a fancy way to save a tab. I just leave the tab open. Not a feature I want, so not something I want them to waste limited development time on. It'd be nice if it were through the bookmarks interface, so booarks could save state & history the way tabs do, but that's not what's proposed so I'd rather not have this. PWAs are a workaround to make up for the limitations of bookmarks.
Don't PWAs already exist and work on mobile? I think they'd work on desktop PWAs again then
Nope, just shortcuts.
I hope like hell the sets of questions were randomized, because if they weren't, they were tweaked by the surveyors beforehand to try and force a particular result.
Like the AI question was paired with some incredibly crappy options like "A browser that runs 2x slower than your current browser". Obviously they want you to click that option as least wanted and leave the AI development alone (if that wasn't a randomized grouping).
Similarly, it looked like they were trying to decide which feature to sacrifice in support of AI dev in later questions, because all 3 would be things I enjoy much more than AI, but I have to rate one as least wanted.
EDIT: OK, thanks for all the responses everyone! Looks like my pairing of AI and 2x slower was just a bad random selection inducing extreme paranoia on my part. Very happy to hear that.
They were randomized.
For me '2x slower' was not paired with any AI.
My 2x slower was paired with the 2x faster 🤣 guess which one I chose?
It was randomised for me because the 2x slower option didn't appear with any AI questions for me
This survey is very confusing
My conference in Mozilla is now almost zero
Yes, I want the most for Firefox to be twice as slow as my current browser (Firefox/Fennec)
I took the survey and I didn't like how they occasionally put all shitty features in a group and I had to pick one I wanted and then followed it with all good stuff in a group and I had to say I didn't want one.
All those features, and the only one I want is customizable hotkeys. Although I guess I'd also take "browser is twice as fast."
Which do you prefer:
( ) browser twice as fast
( ) women find you irresistible
( x) browser twice as fast
( ) women find you irresistible
Faster browser any day...
This the most blizzare survey I have ever seen. What is even happening?
Things I want from Firefox/Mozilla, in no particular order:
I am willing to compromise on the "unreasonable" ones 🦊
Bizarre survey yeah but also why is there a mandatory exact age question at the end? Isn't it normal to be able to opt out of demographic questions for surveys? It also lets us say we'd prefer not to say our gender but not our exact year of birth?
PWA ffs
@neme loaded questions are loaded.
The "Want most" to "Want least" scale is loaded AF.
Where is the option for "I don't want any of these things"?
Edit: Yeah, fuck that. That survey is bullshit. I stopped bothering to give answers due to the multi-choice questions seeming like a way for Mozilla to have a wank about itself.
This is fairly standard survey design, I believe. They're not looking to know which features are wanted in general; they want to know their relative popularity. The sets you're presented are randomised (i.e. we don't all get to see the same sets), which allows them to get a ranked list of lots of potential features, while only having to run ten survey questions per participant.
If you get a set with three features that everyone likes or dislikes at about the same level, then it doesn't really matter want you answer: they'll all end up at the top or bottom of the list, respectively. Because each of those options also get presented as part of different sets to different users, where different answers can win out.
You're bang on. It's called MaxDiff. I use it frequently in my line of work to prioritise product or service messaging with panel data. It's better in some cases to use Inferred preference rather than stated, but generally good to keep the options comparable in "size" of offer.
I would never interpret a MaxDiff model low end result as "wow, 5% of people want slower browsers." Instead I'm focusing on the top cluster. As with any model, they're only ever so accurate. Don't read into the questions too much.
Why not just get one big list with like 4 answers:
How is that worse than getting like 10 screens of relative answers?
Because you'll end up with ten features that all have overwhelmingly "really want" and "want" answers, and then you still don't know which of those ten to work on first.
Really? I'd honestly split them about evenly, maybe even more toward the "don't want" end of the spectrum.
Sorry, I wasn't talking about your answers specifically, but about aggregate results. (Also note that I think you might not get presented with all possible features when taking a single survey.)
The point is not to find the features that people would like, but the features that people would like most.
Additionally, this allows you to find a few features that have particularly high value for a subset of users, even though on average they're not that interesting. (I think Multi-Account Containers are a good example of that: too much of a hassle for many, but for some people, like me, a reason to never switch away from Firefox.)
Then perhaps allow them to pick the top 5 or so, and rank them, and then maybe up to 5 that they don't care about. I'm pretty meh toward a lot of those, and I imagine others are as well.
It doesn't seem randomized based on what I have seen
You mean you've taken it multiple times and kept seeing the exact same ten sets?
@Vincent couldn't finish the survey purely because of the questions suggesting that I should "want" something.
Perhaps if they asked the question differently, they'd have gotten a completed survey from me.
I can't answer loaded questions.
The samples they get are meaningless if only people who complete the survey are counted.
The fact that I couldn't select none of them and move forward, meant something: Jerk Mozilla off, or don't.
I chose not to, and I am a Mozilla user!
#librewolf
I'm half-way through the survey right now; and rather than continuing, just stalling because I don't want to rank another set of three options that I don't care about. Some of the choices already given were like "well, I guess I'll pick the feature that I've at least thought about using once..." but now it's just a list of 3 things that I don't want whatsoever. I'm trying to give useful feedback, but I feel like I'm really just giving noise.
@blind3rdeye it's a load of crap, isn't it?
The statisticians may disagree, but they fail to understand that forcing "want" into the situation is not a true reflection of what people care about.
If they had just tweaked that one word, it wouldn't be as much of a steaming pile of turds that it is.
It's almost like they want people to not finish the survey, so they can have a warped sample.
What about tab groups
I didn't even think what the questionnaire was about, and filled the entire thing. It's a rare thing to see for a FOSS project to ask what I'm staring at this very moment, how to make it better. But yes, the questionnaire was a bit oddly structured.
That isn't a break. They are forcing you rank them by most, least, and between.
That's working as intended. The survey won't accept you wanting two things most or least. You can pick one you want most, one you want least, and the unselected option is the one you have the weakest opinion on.
Of each set of 3, you can only have one marked as most wanted and one marked as least wanted. You will leave one statement blank.
You Should reach out to them and let them know of this glitch.
I don't think you understood the assignment friend.
When I got to the second set of most wanted/least wanted I gave up. Maybe that was the intent behind the design of the survey.
Why?...