Dec 28, 2010 18:51 GMT  ·  By

One of the benefits of having a long beta testing period is all the data you get to collect. The Firefox 4 Beta has been available for months and it came with a version of the Test Pilot add-on pre-installed. This enabled users to send feedback and developers to run regular surveys and usage studies.

In the most recent study the Mozilla Metrics team looked at browsing sessions, their length and number but also more complex aspects.

"The median session is only about 30 minutes long, with a very long tail. The first quartile is about 9 minutes long, while the third is about an hour," Mozilla found.

"The median number of sessions per user, on the other hand, is about 2 a day. Approximately 25% of users actively use the browser only once a day, while the 75th percentile has around 3 sessions a day," it added.

Mozilla defined a browsing session as a period of activity in the browser where actions were no more than 30 minutes apart.

Mozilla found that most people spend about 30 minutes browsing in a single sitting. The vast majority of sessions last from 10 minutes to over an hour.

What's more, most people have just two browsing sessions per day. An interesting correlation that Mozilla found is that those who have more sessions also tend to spend more time browsing.

Frequent users also have more variation in session length, indicating that their sessions are more diverse in scope.

Mozilla also found that the number of extensions is also linked to the way people browse. Those with more extensions installed, over 30, generally spend a lot more time browsing.

Interestingly, the difference in session length between those with fewer 25 total sessions and those with over 25 sessions, in the one week period the test was conducted over, is much smaller than the difference the number of extensions makes.

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Browsing session length
Session length versus number of sessionsSessions ans extensions
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