Your Feedback Matters: Take Our Survey on Browser Features!
connect.mozilla.org
Hello Mozilla Connect Community, I’m Chance York, a User Researcher on the Firefox User Research team. I’m reaching out because our team has created a survey to gather opinions on a handful of browser features, some of which were suggested previously on Mozilla Connect. Your feedback on this survey...
  • eksb@programming.devEnglish
    109·
    3 months ago

    How much AI do you want in your browser:

    ( ) None

    ( ) Zero

    ( ) I want my browser to automatically close any page that mentions AI

    • Thann@lemmy.mlEnglish
      51·
      3 months ago

      Which of these options do you prefer:

      ( ) having an AI assistant integrated into the browser

      ( ) getting kicked in the balls by elon musk

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      14·
      3 months ago

      hi we’re the marketing team and we already decided what we want to do, and we can make up whatever data you want to see for us to justify it!

      • Nikki@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 months ago

        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

  • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
    70·
    3 months ago

    What country do you live in: Germany, United States, Brazil, other

    What? Weird survey options.

    • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
      7·
      3 months ago

      Very weird, because it’s not sorted alphabetically. That means there is a bias in the sorting, because the first option is default and the best option for most users.

        • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
          3·
          3 months ago

          Oh I meant this as a joke, to place Germany as the best answer.^^ But regardless, good to know its random. Probably doesn’t even matter.

          • mryessir@lemmy.sdf.org
            3·
            3 months ago

            𝔅𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔢 𝔣𝔬𝔯𝔪𝔲𝔩𝔦𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔫 𝔖𝔦𝔢 ℑ𝔥𝔯𝔢 𝔎𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔦𝔨 𝔞𝔫 𝔡𝔢𝔯 𝔅𝔲𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔯𝔢𝔭𝔲𝔟𝔩𝔦𝔨 𝔇𝔢𝔲𝔱𝔰𝔠𝔥𝔩𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔭𝔯ä𝔷𝔦𝔰𝔢 𝔲𝔫𝔡 𝔨𝔬𝔫𝔰𝔱𝔯𝔲𝔨𝔱𝔦𝔳. 𝔄𝔫𝔡𝔢𝔯𝔫𝔣𝔞𝔩𝔩𝔰 𝔪ü𝔰𝔰𝔢𝔫 𝔴𝔦𝔯 𝔖𝔦𝔢 𝔞𝔲𝔣 𝔢𝔦𝔫𝔢 𝔏𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢 𝔰𝔢𝔱𝔷𝔢𝔫. 𝔉𝔞𝔵 𝔦𝔰𝔱 𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔪 𝔲𝔫𝔡 𝔟𝔢𝔱𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔟𝔰𝔟𝔢𝔯𝔢𝔦𝔱, 𝔜𝔞𝔫𝔨𝔢𝔢.

    • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
      6·
      3 months ago

      could just be the countries with the most users or where they’ve seen a recent trend, up or down, in local market share.

    • communism@lemmy.ml
      4·
      3 months ago

      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)

  • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    64·
    3 months ago

    i don’t like how they used “want least”, it means three very different things:

    • i want this but it’s not the thing i want the most
    • i don’t care for this
    • oh god fuck no
    • verdigris@lemmy.ml
      14·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • Chloé 🥕@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        5·
        3 months ago

        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

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
          9·
          3 months ago

          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:

          • really want
          • want
          • meh
          • don’t want

          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.

  • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
    57·
    3 months ago

    Which of the following attributes would you most want your new browser to have, and which would you want least?

    Twice as slow as your current browser

    Is that a joke?

      • mke@lemmy.world
        11·
        3 months ago

        I forgot those exist and interpreted it as “Would you sacrifice performance for one of these features?”

        Am I stupid?

        • uranibaba@lemmy.world
          4·
          3 months ago

          I also thought it was a feature vs performance question. How can it be used as a control question?

        • communism@lemmy.ml
          1·
          3 months ago

          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.

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        9·
        3 months ago

        Makes sense. What about those who click that option as a joke? Maybe discount all other replies from that person because of that too?

      • MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown@fedia.io
        7·
        3 months ago

        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?”

      • tiredofsametab@kbin.run
        1·
        3 months ago

        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.

    • Tacoma@feddit.org
      20·
      3 months ago

      For me that was together with

      A privacy-respecting AI assistant that makes your browser smarter by learning how you use it

      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

    • prongs@lemm.ee
      9·
      3 months ago

      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.

  • Dave@lemmy.nz
    34·
    3 months ago

    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".

      • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.orgEnglish
        3·
        3 months ago

        Privacy law considerations. Germany is downright good for its citizens. The US has a round about spying industry. Brazil basically has mandatory mass surveilance. Everyone else’s laws are more or less the same. Not identical. But Mozilla can meet their requirements pretty trivially

        • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
          2·
          3 months ago

          Everyone else’s laws are more or less the same.

          The EU and UK have almost identical privacy laws - the GDPR, so Germany having exceptional privacy laws doesn’t hold up. As far as other privacy laws go I think France has a lead on Germany with approximately the same population, so privacy law can’t be the main consideration.

          • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.orgEnglish
            1·
            3 months ago

            Constituent states within the EU can have more laws on top of the EU’s laws. Maybe things have changed since the last time I had to implement code to respect these laws, but as of two years ago Germany and Sweden were the two countries where we had to make the most considerations with Germany being VERY strong

  • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
    33·
    3 months ago

    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.

    • kill_dash_nine@lemm.eeEnglish
      9·
      3 months ago

      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.

    • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
      5·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
        6·
        3 months ago

        But the language is clear. From these 3 features, choose the one you want the most and the one you want the least 🤔

        • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
          9·
          3 months ago

          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:

          1. Chicken sandwich.
          2. A kick in the balls.
          3. Pork sandwich.

          "

          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.

          • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
            1·
            3 months ago

            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

            • laughterlaughter@lemmy.world
              1·
              3 months ago

              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?

        • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
          3·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • Don_alForno@feddit.orgDeutsch
              3·
              3 months ago

              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.

              • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
                1·
                3 months ago

                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.

                • Don_alForno@feddit.orgDeutsch
                  1·
                  3 months ago

                  It takes way more effort from the user and leads to more people dropping out.

                  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.

                  in the end, the result is the same in Aggregate.

                  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”.

  • Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee
    31·
    3 months ago

    I wonder what percentage of people chose “Least important” for “Do you want another fucking annoying pointless AI assistant?”

  • pop@lemmy.ml
    25·
    3 months ago

    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: config access 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.”

    • jet@hackertalks.comEnglish
      17·
      3 months ago

      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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
        4·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • Eufalconimorph@discuss.tchncs.de
          1·
          3 months ago

          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.

  • sudo42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    21·
    3 months ago

    When looking for a new web browser, which feature would you prefer most and which would you prefer least?

    • A color palette that matches Danny DeVito’s armpit hair.
    • Play the theme to Annie at startup.
    • Take up all computer resources.

    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.

      • ryper@lemmy.caEnglish
        7·
        3 months ago

        They needed to have something that might be less appealing than an AI assistant

      • nyctre@lemmy.world
        4·
        3 months ago

        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.

      • jbk@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        3 months ago

        You’d rather have yours twice as slow than a feature you could probably disable? Weird blind hate ngl

        • unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml
          3·
          3 months ago

          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

  • give@phuu.uk@phuu.uk
    19·
    3 months ago

    @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.

    • Vincent@feddit.nl
      31·
      3 months ago

      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.

      • prongs@lemm.ee
        14·
        3 months ago

        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.

      • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
        8·
        3 months ago

        The problem with this design is, if people do not care, then they will give random answers, if they don’t have the option to not care. Also this would be important information for Mozilla too, if many people do not care about a specific question. So I feel like they should have done that. But, who am I…

        • Vincent@feddit.nl
          2·
          3 months ago

          Presumably if people don’t care, they don’t fill in the survey. But as an extra failsafe, they’ve also included the feature “twice as slow as your current browser”. If you rank that high, then your result can probably be discarded.

          But yeah, this design has worked well for many other surveys, so presumably it’ll work well for this one. They’re the experts :)

          • thingsiplay@beehaw.org
            3·
            3 months ago

            Presumably if people don’t care, they don’t fill in the survey.

            That’s not what I said. People care about the survey and they do a favor to Mozilla with it. And if a question does not have the answer they want to give, then it becomes a problem. It’s a different scenario than what you were saying.

            But yeah, this design has worked well for many other surveys, so presumably it’ll work well for this one. They’re the experts :)

            With that attitude and without acknowledging a problem, it won’t get better. If they were the experts, then they wouldn’t need a survey. But its easy to discredit any credit with that dumb argument.

            • Vincent@feddit.nl
              1·
              3 months ago

              They’re the experts in survey-taking, not in knowing what the users want - the users are experts in that. Hence the survey.

              That remark was basically a reformulation of and agreeing with your “But, who am I…”

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        3 months ago

        Why not just get one big list with like 4 answers:

        • really want
        • want
        • meh
        • don’t want

        How is that worse than getting like 10 screens of relative answers?

        • Vincent@feddit.nl
          2·
          3 months ago

          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.

            • Vincent@feddit.nl
              1·
              3 months ago

              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.)

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                3 months ago

                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.

      • give@phuu.uk@phuu.uk
        4·
        3 months ago

        @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

        • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee
          2·
          3 months ago

          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.

          • give@phuu.uk@phuu.uk
            1·
            3 months ago

            @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.

        • Vincent@feddit.nl
          1·
          3 months ago

          You mean you’ve taken it multiple times and kept seeing the exact same ten sets?

    • LWD@lemm.ee
      7·
      3 months ago

      I don’t know if the survey questions are loaded, but it feels like they could easily be misinterpreted.

      For example, somebody might rank the “organize toolbar buttons and AI chatbots” even if they hate AI’s snake oil, and now Mozilla has a data point where they can say “Some of our respondents said they want AI as much as side tabs!”

      This seems especially sketchy when the side tab idea came directly from a vocal portion of Mozilla users, while the decision to follow the AI chatbot trend was decided by the same management that overpays their CEO every year.

  • heavyboots@lemmy.mlEnglish
    17·
    3 months ago

    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.

  • navordar@lemmy.ml
    16·
    3 months ago

    Yes, I want the most for Firefox to be twice as slow as my current browser (Firefox/Fennec)