1 Billion Add-on Downloads
This morning, addons.mozilla.org reached a huge milestone: we served our 1 billionth add-on download since we started keeping track of downloads in 2005.
This number only includes downloads from addons.mozilla.org, but as many add-ons are hosted elsewhere, we can be sure the actual number is even higher. This is a very exciting week for Firefox add-ons, with the launch of Fashion Your Firefox yesterday, offering a new way for first-time add-on users to customize their browser.
This amazing feat was made possible by the huge community of add-on users, developers, and enthusiasts, as well as non-Firefox applications that embrace Mozilla add-ons like Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, Sunbird, Komodo, Flock, and Songbird, to name a few.
At 1.5 million add-on downloads per day and increasing, I’m confident our next billion will arrive even more quickly than the 3.5 years it took for the first. If you’re not using an add-on yet, try one out. They’re pretty popular.
Categories: add-ons, amo, mozilla, planet.mozilla.org | Tags: add-ons, amo, mozilla, stats | Comments (3)Top Ten Add-ons II
One year ago today I made a blog post listing the “top 10″ add-ons according to three different sources of data. The point of that post was to show the differences in the methods and highlight how a single add-on might be outstanding in one area (for example, downloads), but not in another (for example, user retention/active users). I wanted to show these lists for 2008 and take a look at how much those lists can change over the course of a year.
First, the data for 2008:
| 2008 Rank | By Total Downloads | By Active Daily Users |
|---|---|---|
| Source: extension and theme downloads and update pings from addons.mozilla.org for add-ons that a user must opt-in to installing. (excludes other add-on types and extensions that are bundled with 3rd party software) | ||
| 1 | FlashGot | Adblock Plus |
| 2 | NoScript | IE Tab↑2 |
| 3 | Adblock Plus↑3 | Video DownloadHelper↑39 |
| 4 | DownThemAll!↑7 | Download Statusbar↓1 |
| 5 | IE Tab↑4 | FlashGot↓3 |
| 6 | Download Statusbar↑4 | DownThemAll!↑5 |
| 7 | Noia 2.0 (eXtreme)↓4 | Forecastfox™↓2 |
| 8 | Video DownloadHelper↑52 | Greasemonkey↑9 |
| 9 | Forecastfox™↓4 | NoScript↑3 |
| 10 | VideoDownloader↓6 | Firebug↑6 |
The first, most important conclusion I came to from analyzing this data is that the Firefox add-ons ecosystem is very healthy. It’s not stagnant, and it’s not volatile.
But total download counts can be rather old and stubborn — they encompass every download addons.mozilla.org has served for an add-on since 2004 (over 900 million of them). This gives older add-ons a pretty large advantage over newer add-ons, and once an add-on makes it into the “most popular” listing, it’s downloaded simply because it’s popular.
With that in mind, I thought I’d show 2 other “top 10″ download lists that paint a better picture of what’s happening right now.
| Rank | Downloads since Sept. 15, 2007 | Downloads this week |
|---|---|---|
| Source: extension and theme downloads from addons.mozilla.org for add-ons that a user must opt-in to installing. (excludes other add-on types and extensions that are bundled with 3rd party software) | ||
| 1 | Adblock Plus | Adblock Plus |
| 2 | Video DownloadHelper | Video DownloadHelper |
| 3 | FlashGot | NoScript |
| 4 | NoScript | DownThemAll! |
| 5 | DownThemAll! | FlashGot |
| 6 | Download Statusbar | Fast Dial |
| 7 | IE Tab | Fast Video Download |
| 8 | Greasemonkey | ColorfulTabs |
| 9 | Aero Fox | Firebug |
| 10 | Cooliris (formerly PicLens) | Cooliris (formerly PicLens) |
Some things I took away from this data:
-
Add-ons can make or break themselves. Video DownloadHelper is a great example as an add-on that was ranked #60 in total downloads a year ago, and has shot up to #8 - certainly not an easy feat. On the other hand, extensions like Fasterfox and Adblock (not Plus) have disappeared from every top 10 list because they haven’t been updated in around 2 years, among other things.
Taking a look at compatibility of the add-ons above, 10 are compatible with Firefox 3, 5 support Firefox 3 and the latest 3.1 builds, and 1 (VideoDownloader) only supports Firefox 2 and is on track to disappear from the Total Downloads list soon.
- Add-on types besides extensions are gaining popularity. Looking at the 4 lists above, there are 2 themes listed: Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) and Aero Fox. But what you can’t see from the above lists — because they only include extensions and themes — is that the United States English Dictionary is actually the #7 add-on by Active Daily Users and #5 in downloads over the past year. That’s users from non-en-US locales downloading the en-US dictionary, which is very interesting in itself, but better left for someone else to analyze.
- There are popular add-ons of all ages. Of the 17 individual add-ons represented in the above 4 lists, the year of creation breakdown looks like this:
- 2004 (5) - Download Statusbar, Noia 2.0 (eXtreme), DownThemAll!, FlashGot, Forecastfox™
- 2005 (4) - NoScript, Greasemonkey, ColorfulTabs, IE Tab
- 2006 (5) - Firebug, Adblock Plus, VideoDownloader, Video DownloadHelper, Fast Video Download
- 2007 (3) - Cooliris (formerly PicLens), Fast Dial, Aero Fox (2 of these are less than a year old)
- 2008 (0) - how many add-ons yet to be created will appear on next year’s lists?
The above points are thought-provoking and interesting, but the main thing I’m going to take away from this research is reassurance that, even with Facebook, iPhone, Ubiquity, and all of the other platforms available for developers to choose from, developing add-ons for Firefox is still useful, exciting, and relevant.
Categories: add-ons, amo, mozilla, planet.mozilla.org | Tags: add-ons, amo, mozilla, stats | Comments (7)AMO Add-on Review Status
The AMO editors have been hard at work, reviewing 255 add-on updates and submissions in the 2 weeks before Firefox 3’s launch, and 238 updates/submissions between launch day (Tuesday) and Sunday.
There are currently 228 updates in the queue and 373 new nominated add-ons. There are normally about 10 new add-ons submitted to AMO every day, but since the release there have been 20-40 every day. Similarly, there are normally about 60-70 updates to existing add-ons every day, but since the launch there have been 100 - 150 every day.
Below is a graph of submission and update rates since 2004, hitting a peak of 235 updates on the day after release and 42 new submissions 2 days after release. You can also see a zoomed-in version of the graph. Astute observers will also notice a large increase in submissions in November 2006, when Firefox 2 was released.
Please be patient as our editors work through this backlog. You can read more about volunteering if you’d like to help.
A huge thanks to all of the editors who have donated their time and effort to make sure Firefox 3’s add-ons experience is great. Below is the list of editors with the number of reviews they’ve done since March 2007.
| Editor | Reviews since March 2007 | June 2008 Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| Mel Reyes | 2026 | 199 |
| Oliver Saier | 1663 | 26 |
| Pavel Cvrcek | 1102 | 64 |
| Archaeopteryx | 560 | 58 |
| Andrew Williamson | 335 | 43 |
| Lukas Blakk | 223 | 0 |
| Michael Z | 186 | 29 |
| Shawn Wilsher | 162 | 0 |
| Cesar Oliveira | 146 | 61 |
| Anthony Hughes | 118 | 0 |
| Basil Hashem | 115 | 44 |
| Sid Kalra | 112 | 0 |
| Brian King | 88 | 27 |
| Mike Shaver | 35 | 0 |
| Thomas McMahon | 26 | 0 |
| Wil Clouser | 25 | 0 |
| Jeremy Morton | 23 | 11 |
| Justin Scott | 22 | 9 |
| Alex Polvi | 16 | 0 |
| John Ford | 13 | 0 |
| Aronnax G. | 11 | 0 |
| Kohei Yoshino | 9 | 2 |
| Gijs Kruitbosch | 9 | 0 |
| mcdavis941 | 8 | 0 |
| Prasad Sunkari | 6 | 0 |
| Naoyuki ASANO | 5 | 0 |
| Frederic Wenzel | 3 | 0 |
| Ryan Jackson | 2 | 0 |
| Majken Connor | 2 | 0 |
| Pascal Beyeler | 2 | 0 |
| Andrei Hajdukewycz | 1 | 0 |
A note on add-on stats this week
Add-on developers who log in to AMO and check their stats dashboard may be very happy to find that their active daily users have increased quite a bit this week (my own add-on reports a 46% increase since last week). I wanted to remind developers how we determine ADU and why it is slightly skewed this week.
By default, Firefox will check an add-on’s updateURL every 24 hours to look for an update. Add-ons that don’t have an updateURL specified default to AMO, which is how we determine how many “active daily users” an add-on has. The number of times an add-on’s GUID was pinged on AMO is approximately how many people were using that add-on that day.
In addition to the 24 hour checks, the same URL is pinged for several other reasons such as manually checking for updates, Firefox installations and upgrades, and installed add-on detection for Rock Your Firefox. Unfortunately, there’s not currently a way to differentiate these types of pings, so they are all counted as active daily users instead of only the scheduled pings. (see bug 392180)
So, this week’s large increase can be attributed to a couple things:
- Downloads - Most add-ons also had a huge increase in the number of downloads this week. My own add-on went from 3,000 downloads per day to hitting 16,000 on Wednesday. If your add-on’s install.rdf doesn’t say it’s compatible with the Firefox version installed, Firefox will ping AMO to see if there’s a new version or if this version actually is compatible. (This is how you can update your compatibility on AMO without uploading a new version.)
- Firefox 3 installations - When users upgrade Firefox to a new version of Firefox 2 or to Firefox 3, it will ping AMO for every extension installed to see if there’s a new maxVersion. After that, it displays a list of incompatible add-ons and offers the ability to check for new versions. (Thanks to Dave Townsend for researching this.)
Both of these will result in one or more additional update pings, as the compatibility will still be checked every 24 hours as usual.
And now, some aggregate statistics for your enjoyment:
Total downloads from AMO last Tuesday (6/10) and Wednesday (6/11): 932,072 + 985,229 = 1,917,301
Total downloads from AMO this Tuesday (6/17) and Wednesday (6/18): 2,454,024 + 4,472,336 = 6,926,360
Update pings to AMO from hosted add-ons last Wednesday (6/11): 115,375,160
Update pings to AMO from hosted add-ons this Wednesday (6/18): 141,233,285
(I expect Thursday’s ADU count is a good bit higher than Wednesday’s.)
AMO Statistics Dashboard
Yesterday, Mike announced the public preview of the upcoming changes to addons.mozilla.org (AMO). One of the new features that has been long-requested is the ability for developers to see how many update pings, or Active Daily Users, their add-ons have. Just like Firefox, extensions check for updates once a day, and we count how many times this happens for each extension. While the total number of downloads tells add-on authors about how many people have tried out their extension, the active daily user count tells them about how many people used it on a given day, although it’s not perfect.
There’s a bit of fine print regarding active daily usage, but some of the more important points are:
- Only add-ons that do not have an updateURL specified are counted. All add-ons are required to have an empty updateURL when submitted to AMO. If an add-on is distributed from another website with an updateURL, those pings are not counted by us.
- Active Daily Users is not the same as saying “this many people use my extension”. Not all extension users use Firefox every day of the week, users can manually check for updates which will count false active users, etc.
- Many people keep extensions installed but disabled. The stats dashboard allows you to see the various statuses, such as enabled, disabled, incompatible, etc.
Now that some background information is out of the way, on to the features!
Summary Graph and Table
The first thing you’ll see in the stats dashboard is a summary graph that shows the downloads per day and active daily users for the last 2 weeks. Active daily users are currently only counted on Wednesdays, but will switch to every day in the future when we change around the back-end processing. Below the graph is a summary table that shows download information on the left and active daily user information on the right.
Customizable Graphs
The plot selector dropdown in the top left allows you to choose a graph to display: Downloads, Active Daily Users, or Active Daily Users broken down by Add-on Version, Application, Add-on Status, or Operating System. Downloads and Active Daily Users will give a historical graph since July 2007 (or later if your add-on is newer). The ADU breakdown graphs will sort the values by total count and plot the top 6 so that the graph isn’t horribly cluttered. You can use these plot dropdowns to change any of the plots to another value, or even use the options menu at the right to add more plots.
All of these graphs have Firefox and add-on events layered on them so that you can see where the release of a new Firefox or add-on version might have influenced download or ADU numbers. The options menu also allows you to make the graph larger and view the CSV file of the data used in the graph.
RSS
There’s now an RSS feed of the Statistics Summary box updated every day with the latest download and active daily user totals.
Public vs. Private
By changing the settings of their dashboard, add-on authors can designate their statistics as public or private. All dashboards are private by default, meaning only the add-on authors and Mozilla can see the statistics, with the exception of Total Downloads. The number of total downloads was displayed publicly prior to March 2006, and with the upcoming changes will once again be displayed on the add-on’s display page. Active Daily Users and the detailed breakdowns, however, have never been public before and are only part of the dashboard. If the dashboard is set to public, a link will appear on the add-on’s display page to view the statistics, and anyone browsing the statistics index will see a list of all public stats add-ons to view.
I’ve marked one of my add-ons as public, so feel free to take a look at the dashboard yourself. (You don’t even have to log in!)
Known Issues
There are number of known issues filed and a number of known issues in my head for which I haven’t yet filed bugs. Some of the more annoying issues are actually Timeplot (graphing library) bugs that we’ll work on fixing, such as the value popups overlapping and being hard to identify with a plot. I’m also planning on adding a good bit of documentation to the stats dashboard so that you don’t have to read this blog post to understand how everything works.
Feedback
Feedback on the Stats Dashboard can go to the feedback wiki, or for specific bugs and features, please file a bug.
Categories: add-ons, amo, mozilla, planet.mozilla.org | Tags: add-ons, amo, developer tools, mozilla, stats | Comments (9)Rock Your Firefox Update
It’s been 4 months since my last Rock Your Firefox post, and since I’m all about stats updates lately, here’s the latest:
- Over 7500 people have tried the application, with 4400 still using it and around 45 people interacting with it daily
- Average of 13-15 application adds every day although occasional spikes up to 35 per day, and about the same number of removes every day, although most of the removes are from people that added some time ago
- This chart shows the breakdown of how users found and added the application today.
- There were 12 application adds this week from someone accepting an invitation to RYF sent by a friend
- The application “About Page” has about 50 page views every day
- Over 24,000 favorites added, 8000 of which were added using the automatic import feature
So, what amazing features are planned now? None! The app doesn’t have any major bugs and does its job well for the number of users it serves. I don’t think there’s a need for me to continue active development, which is why that actually stopped a number of months ago. Of course, the app is open source and part of AMO’s codebase, so patches are welcome.
There are a couple other reasons I’m not too excited about working on Facebook Platform stuff anymore.
For one, while it’s pretty easy to get started developing an application for Facebook Platform, it’s now almost a full-time job trying to keep an application up to date utilizing all of the latest bugfixes and improvements, something that only companies dedicated to Facebook App development can handle. There are changes and new features constantly announced in the Platform Status Feed, Developer News Blog, and weekly push SVN commit log. Developers might also find themselves spending time in the platform Bugzilla, forum, or wiki. There are so many sources of information to follow if you want to feel like you’re on top of things.
There was a time when I complained about the lack of all of these tools (mainly the open bug tracking system), so I suppose I should be happy they’re here. Rock Your Firefox has been fortunate in that it hasn’t been broken by any of the changes so far — at least not any of the intentional changes.
Another reason I think putting RYF into maintenance mode a few months ago was the right decision is that Facebook apps seem to have gone from cool and trendy to just annoying lately. When someone sends me an application invitation these days, I just feel bothered. Especially because I’m obsessive enough that I have to immediately get rid of it. I’m one of those people that clears their Gmail spam every time they notice the number. (Note: to anyone who plans on sending me a bunch of application invitations now, I have anticipated this and determined that it will not be funny. Now you don’t have to do it!)
This is a bit longer than it was supposed to be. I’ll probably post another RYF update in 6 months or so. If you haven’t tried out Rock Your Firefox, you can check it out here.
Categories: mozilla, planet.mozilla.org, rock your firefox | Tags: facebook platform, mozilla, rock your firefox, stats | Comment (1)Top Ten Add-ons
I’ve wanted to make this post for awhile and never got around to it, but a recent conversation reminded me about it. Below are the “top 10″ add-ons (extensions and themes) collected three different ways. (This table best viewed on my actual blog.)
| Total Downloads | Active Users | Facebook Favorites | |
| 1 | FlashGot | Adblock Plus | Adblock Plus |
| 2 | NoScript | FlashGot | Greasemonkey |
| 3 | Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) | Download Statusbar | Download Statusbar |
| 4 | VideoDownloader | IE Tab | Web Developer |
| 5 | Forecastfox | Forecastfox | IE Tab |
| 6 | Adblock Plus | VideoDownloader | Firebug |
| 7 | Adblock | Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) | Tab Mix Plus |
| 8 | Fasterfox | Fasterfox | del.icio.us Bookmarks |
| 9 | IE Tab | Tab Mix Plus | StumbleUpon |
| 10 | Download Statusbar | PDF Download | FoxyTunes |
Total Downloads and Weekly Downloads are the methods currently used for the “Most Popular” searches on AMO, and represents the number of downloads of that add-on from addons.mozilla.org.
Active Users is based on the number of daily update pings, and is a better metric of the popularity of an add-on because it shows which are actually being used after downloading. This information is not yet available on AMO, but we’re working on it.
Facebook Favorites is the number of users that have added that add-on to their favorites/recommended list in Rock Your Firefox. This shows add-ons that are both in use and loved. It would be a better metric of both popularity and quality than the others if the data wasn’t skewed a bit in that people that use Rock Your Firefox tend to be more technically inclined. Once we bring the favorites system to AMO, this data will be more reliable.
Categories: amo, mozilla, planet.mozilla.org | Tags: add-ons, amo, mozilla, stats | Comments (6)A Comparison
I was reading a post about it being Facebook Platform’s 3 month anniversary and decided to do a little comparison.
| Firefox Add-ons | Facebook Platform | |
| User base | 75-100 million[1] | 30 million[2] |
| New Downloads/Users per day | 500,000[3] | 100,000+[4] |
| Age | 5 years | 3 months |
| Available Locales | 40+ | 1 |
| Open Source | Yes | Not on purpose |
| Extensibility | Complete | Restricted |
| API Stability | Stable within major releases | Constantly changing, often with little warning |
| Community Gatherings | Developer Days | Developer Garages |
| Corporate Involvement | Yes (AllPeers, StumbleUpon, etc) | Yes (Slide, RockYou, etc) |
| Number of add-ons/applications in directory | 2500 public; 1300 sandbox* | 3300[5] |
| Number of developers | 3175* | Unknown |
| Add-ons/applications with over 1 million active users | 40+* | 46[6] |
| Google News articles in the last month | 55 | 501 |
| Bug reporting | Completely open | Completely internal |
| Overlap | Rock Your Firefox | Facebook Toolbar |
* Only considers add-ons hosted on addons.mozilla.org; there are many add-ons hosted by their individual developers not taken into account.
I’m not one to get into the politics of whether Facebook Platform is good for the web. I’m more interested in what we can do to have people as excited about Firefox add-ons as they are about getting that one person who always takes forever in Scrabulous to finally go.
What can we learn from Facebook Platform? Why do people so readily add applications?
- Applications are restricted. People know exactly what an application is allowed to do within Facebook because you see a list of checkboxes when you add it. It can’t cause data loss. It can’t modify your information. Extensions can do anything they want. They can cause data loss. They can do bad things to your computer. I think that Firefox users who have never tried extensions are either: a) confused about what extensions are, or b) concerned about their security
- Applications are required to view content. If someone sends you something in an application, you often have to add that application to see it. In Firefox, we call those plug-ins. I can’t think of any extensions that you have to add in order to see content you find scattered around the web.
- You know when friends add applications. People add applications when they see something cool that a friend added. With Firefox add-ons, you don’t know what add-ons your friends use unless you use their browser or they talk about their extensions. (Although many of my friends talk about what extensions they use, I think it is fair to say this is not the norm.) This is what Rock Your Firefox tries to solve: seeing what add-ons your friends use and improving discoverability.
Having said that, I’m not saying that we should make any changes to be more like Facebook. I certainly think that extensions’ ability to modify anything is key to the innovation that we see all the time in new extensions. I think we need to find out what facets of the Firefox ecosystem are the most compelling and make people realize that everything that’s being done on Facebook could be done even better in the open web.
(Obligatory disclaimer: The above opinions are my own and are not affiliated with any entity in which I may be involved.)
Categories: add-ons, amo, mozilla, planet.mozilla.org, rock your firefox | Tags: add-ons, amo, facebook, facebook platform, mozilla, stats | Comments (6)
