Wiki page to discuss a new ADU stat crashes since last ADU ping

[Ozten]

As requested in the CrashKill meeting, here[1] is a wiki page to
discuss a change to the extensions blocklist request. These requests
are used to calculate active daily users (ADU).

In a nutshell:
When we send the ADU ping, can we also send
- total number of crashes since last ADU ping

[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Extension_Blocklisting:New_Attribute_Crashes_Since_Last_Request

Thanks for your input.

[Jesper Kristensen]

Ozten skrev:

I really don't like this. Blocklist is a service for users to receive a
list of blocked addons. The browser should send only the absolute
minimum amount of information needed for this particular service to
work. Appending any other information for statistics gathering is a
misuse of the feature, no matter how good the intentions. If we want
users to send usage data for statistics, that could be done separately
and it should be possible for privacy concerned users to disable it
separately. I don't like privacy concerned users disabling blocklisting
pings because Mozilla started to send all sorts of usage data with the ping.

Jesper

[Mike Shaver]

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Ozten <aust...@gmail.com> wrote:
> As requested in the CrashKill meeting, here[1] is a wiki page to
> discuss a change to the extensions blocklist request. These requests
> are used to calculate active daily users (ADU).
>
> In a nutshell:
> When we send the ADU ping, can we also send
> - total number of crashes since last ADU ping

I don't think we should put this unrelated data into the blocklist
ping. We can put it in the crash reporter's submission, or a general
health check that we disclose widely and let users disable, but I
don't think it's appropriate to put crash statistics in the blocklist
ping just because it's handy. (Also, we may over time change what we
use to estimate ADU, as we have already done once, and I don't want to
have to sprinkle the crash data in other such places as we do.)

Mike

[Ozten]

On Nov 24, 5:34 am, Mike Shaver <mike.sha...@gmail.com> wrote:

I agree with you and Jesper that ADU might not be the right channel,
but I didn't state clearly in the wiki page why crash submission is
too late to fix any bias.

Old:
ADU is a shaky baseline for the following reasons
Updated:
Our current "total crashes" numbers are a shaky baseline for the
following reasons
...
By piggybacking on ADU we eliminate these opt out issues. ADU on the
other hand is also opt out. The reasoning behind this number being
more trustworthy is

* ease of opting out during a crash reporter versus blocklist opt
out
* stress of "just wanting to restart"
* change of opt-in versus opt-out skewing this rate across prod/
version

Updated in https://wiki.mozilla.org/Extension_Blocklisting:New_Attribute_Crashes_Since_Last_Request#Problem

[Robert Strong]

The desire to use the blocklist ping is very well understood by several
of us (been through similar proposals before) and it still doesn't
change my opinion of piggybacking on existing services to achieve your goal.

As I see it, a user that doesn't want this new data to be sent should
not have to choose between receiving updated blocklist data and not
sending this new data is the primary reason though there are IMO other
less important reasons.

Robert

[Blair McBride]

On 25/11/2009 2:34 a.m., Mike Shaver wrote:
> or a general health check that we disclose widely and let users
> disable

Always wondered why Firefox didn't do this - it'd be helpful for
numerous things. Of course, we have Test Pilot now, but that's more
suited to specific studies. Maybe now is a good time to look into it again?

- Blair

[Clint Talbert]

I tend to agree here. The crash stats is just the first "health" check
we'd like to do. I imagine that there will be other interesting things
in the future, so I vote for creating a separate mechanism for this
rather than overloading our current blocklist mechanism.

Clint