Firefox Usage Visualisation
15 Dec 2010
Recently I've been finding myself reading a lot about data visualisation and I've become quite interested in the many different ways it's possible to display data. I've fiddled a little with Processing in the past – I like the way it's super easy to show something tangible with very little effort (especially as graphics isn't my strong point). In my recent readings about visualisation, I came across the Mozilla Open Data Visualization Competition, a competition held by Mozilla to visualise data gathered from users participating in Test Pilot program. Test Pilot anonymously gathers data relating to various aspects of typical Firefox usage from users who have chosen to participate.
I spent a while thinking what parts of this data to visualise, then realised the deadline was a couple of days away so chose something reasonably quick and easy. I wanted to see how the open source nature of Firefox affected other devices and software its users choose. People use Firefox for many different reasons but I wanted to find out what the proportion of people using it due to the fact that it's open source. The surveys and data gathered in Test Pilot cover a wide range of aspects of Firefox usage but there was some data that was useful for this. First things first, the visualisation.
There were two aspects I was interested in: what smartphones are Firefox users using and what other browsers they use. The circular graphs on the left indicate which specific phones/browsers are in use and the pie charts on the right show the total proportion of these in terms of open and closed source.
It's clear from the smartphone graph that the majority of users don't use a smartphone (which I have to say surprised me). I should point out here that this question in the survey was optional, although mostly it was answered by everyone. The next largest proportion was the iPhone, followed closely by Android. With regard to software licensing, the open/closed source split was reasonably close. I categorised the operating systems as follows:
- Open source: Android, Maemo, Symbian
- Closed source: iOS, Windows Mobile, Palm, RIM
As for alternative browsers, Internet Explorer still clearly has a slight lead (again I should point out that Test Pilot is a survey conducted on users who use Firefox most probably as their primary browser and are "savvy" enough to know about, opt into and install Test Pilot, so it really isn't indicative of internet users on a broad scale at all).
It was slightly more challenging to categorise in browsers in terms of open/closed source. A lot of Chrome is open source (although potions aren't), so I decided that because the majority is, I would include it in that category. Internet Explorer and Safari clearly aren't and Opera is mostly proprietary (although has components that are open source) so all three go into the "closed source" category. I'm bring rather generic here by only having two categories (and not, for example, "Mostly closed source but with some open compents", etc. because I wanted to get a broad idea of whether open source software licensing was important to Firefox users). The pie chart clearly shows most other browsers being used are closed source.
So to summarise, it doesn't look like there is a strong relationship between using an open source browser and using other open source software in other areas, which indicates people typically use Firefox for other reasons.