14 DAY TRIAL // One of the interesting things about the Firefox 4 Betas has been the Feedback button based on Test Pilot technology. This enables the developers to know more about the users and their behavior in order to see what works and what doesn't and on what to focus on.
Earlier this week the Mozilla Metrics blog published a small study showing how and when people used the Private Browsing feature in Firefox. Now though, we have the results of a survey about the Firefox 4 user base.
"[W]e were excited to examine responses to the Firefox 4 Beta Background Survey. This short survey was pushed to all Beta users through the Feedback add-on and asked a few basic browsing behavior and demographic questions," Andres Garcia, an intern at Mozilla, wrote.
"In all, over 30,000 people, or roughly 7% of the entire Beta user-base, were kind enough to submit their responses," he added.
"Analyzing these submissions will not only help us understand the current Beta users, but also reveal the missing user groups we need to acquire to make the Beta sample more representative of the larger, general Firefox population," he explained.
Most of the results aren't very surprising but are interesting nonetheless. Most beta users are young, to be expected, and 75 percent of the respondents are under 35 years old with most of them between 18 and 35 years old.
While a predominantly male population is to be expected, 96 percent of Firefox 4 beta users are male, certainly not representative of the Firefox user base or for the web in general.
Another aspect of the survey focused on technical skill. Unsurprisingly, most of the users, 71 percent ranked themselves as having Advanced technical skills. What's more, most of the respondents spent an average of four to six hours online each day.
The types of sites the beta survey respondents typically visit are perhaps more representative for the larger population. Search engines take the top spot with News Sites and Webmail following.
The purpose of the survey was to see who was testing Firefox 4 and which groups were under-represented. Of course, only about 7 percent of beta users actually responded, so the results may not even be entirely accurate for the entire beta user base.
But the results are clear, Mozilla needs to attract older users and especially more female beta users. As Firefox 4 beta gets more polished and closer to the final product, less technical users should start joining in and the beta testing should be more representative.
