Mozilla publishes Firefox Public Data Report

Firefox Public Data Report is a new weekly report by Mozilla that offers current and historic statistics on user metrics, usage behavior, and configurations on mobile and desktop operating systems.

Has Firefox lost users in the last twelve months? What are the most widely used languages, the percentage of Firefox installations with Tracking Protection enabled or add-ons installed, or the top operating system?

The Firefox Public Data Report answers these and other questions. The data is updated weekly and Mozilla aims to be more open about core Firefox metrics and to provide anyone with a better understanding of  the state of the Web and Firefox in particular.

Firefox Public Data Report

The main URL of the report is https://data.firefox.com/. Just click on the link to open the main report page in any modern web browser. The report is split into desktop and mobile sections, and each section is divided into "user activity", "usage behavior", and "hardware across the Web".

Note: mobile reports are not yet available at the time of writing.

Some settings support the selection of regions or different time periods to narrow the data sets down.

User Activity

User Activity is all about the "state of the Firefox Desktop userbase" and web consumption. The report displays more than a year worth of the following statistics:

• Yearly Active Users
• Monthly Active Users
• Daily Usage
• Average Intensity
• New Profile Rate
• Latest Version

Probably most interesting from a Firefox enthusiasts' perspective are the yearly and monthly active users. Firefox had about 900 million active yearly users in August 2017 and about 861 million in August 2018.

Mozilla recorded about 277 million monthly active users in August 2017 and about 256 million monthly active users in August 2018.

Usage Behavior

Usage Behavior lists "ways in which desktop users are interacting with the web". The report lists top languages, the percentage of tracking protection that is set to on always, the percentage of users with add-ons, and the top ten add-ons.

US English is the leading language with about 40% of all installations. It is followed by German with about 11%, French with 6.5%, and Russian and Spanish with about 5% each.

Always on tracking protection is on the rise. About 1.3% of all Firefox users have turned on the feature permanently.

Add-on usage sits at about 35% of all Firefox desktop clients, a drop from about 38% a year ago. In other words, only a third of Firefox users use add-ons.

The top ten add-ons as of August 2018 are:

Rank	Add-on	Usage
1	Adblock Plus	9.384%
2	uBlock Origin	3.296%
3	Video DownloadHelper	2.697%
4	Cisco Webex Extension	1.411%
5	Визуальные закладки	1.255%
6	Search Extension by Ask	1.184%
7	AdBlock	0.969%
8	SaveFrom.net помощник	0.925%
9	Советник Яндекс.Маркета	0.868%
10	Ghostery – Privacy Ad Blocker	0.795%

Hardware across the Web

The third and final section is all about hardware used by a "representative sample of the population from Firefox's release channel on desktop". It lists information about used CPUs and GPUs, operating systems, whether Flash or Unity is supported, or the display resolution.

Closing Words

The report provides excellent insight into the Firefox ecosystem, distribution of the browser, hardware and software use, and trends.

While Firefox use seems to drop year over year when you check usage share analytics services, the drop is not really reflected in yearly or monthly active users. While there has been a drop, it is not nearly as big to explain the discrepancy.

The publication of the report provides users and journalists with statistical data that Firefox enthusiasts and journalists may use to refute rumors or in the analysis of trends.

Now You: What is the most interesting revelation from the report?