14 DAY TRIAL // Mozilla is starting to expand the Test Pilot program to Thunderbird. Via Test Pilot, Mozilla will be able to carry out real-world usage tests to get valuable insights that it would have no other way of obtaining.
"Over the past several months, Test Pilot has provided valuable information to the Firefox developers with over a dozen Test Pilot studies launched covering tabbed browsing behavior, search interfaces, and menu usage. Now is the time to apply the same great tool to Thunderbird," Mozilla announced.
The move was prefaced in January, but Mozilla is only now ready to go ahead. The first test will go out today and is designed to study general usage. It's a recurring test that will go live for a week and record usage patterns.
It will then lay dormant for 60 days before a new week of study starts. This will go on for a year. Note that users have full freedom over how much they share if anything.
Test Pilot collects data only if users choose to. Furthermore, before any data is sent to Mozilla, users are asked for confirmation again. For the first study, dubbed "A week in the Life of Thunderbird," users will be able to join for a week or stay on for the full year the study is scheduled to take.
The study will look only at two big metrics. For one, it will look at how long Thunderbird stays running in a single session. It will also look at how often the client is started and restarted and for what reason.
The second big focus will be on how the software is used, how many tabs are open at any given time, what add-ons are installed and how many are used. The search feature will also be tracked, how often it's used, not what users are searching for.