14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla Labs has put the finishing touches on Test Pilot, a Firefox add-on designed to help Mozilla study the behavior and preferences of the browser’s users in order to improve it, and is now releasing Test Pilot 1.0. The milestone release comes after almost a year’s work and is an incremental update from the beta and alpha builds. The main new feature is compatibility with Firefox development builds, specifically Firefox 3.7a.
“It has been 10 short months since we released the first version of Test Pilot (the inaugural v0.1). Today we are excited to announce the final release of Test Pilot 1.0!,” Mozilla Labs’ Jinghua Zhang, the product manager for Test Pilot, wrote.
“Test Pilot 1.0 solves the compatibility issues with Firefox nightly builds and includes a number of bug fixes and improvements to the user interface from TestPilot 1.0 beta. With this release people who are on Firefox 3.7a can also participate in Test Pilot studies,” she added.
The version number is mostly symbolic, but it does emphasize that the add-on is feature-complete and should enable the developers to conduct all the studies they need. Specific changes in Test Pilot 1.0 are support for testing builds of Firefox and the usual array of bug fixes. With the latest version, Firefox testers can participate in Test Pilot surveys and studies just like regular Firefox users.
Mozilla has already conducted several studies using Test Pilot and all the results have been published under an open license. This means that other researchers can use the anonymized data in their work.
Test Pilot was launched last year as a Firefox add-on aimed at helping Mozilla developers study the user’s behavior to know what ares to focus on and what features need work. In true Mozilla style, it relies on the support of the community, Test Pilot studies aren’t worth very much without a large enough sample. Mozilla says more than 9,000 people have participated in the last studies.
Test Pilot 1.0 for Firefox is available for download here.
Firefox for Windows is available for download here. Firefox for Linux is available for download here. Firefox for Mac is available for download here.