On 1/4/16 12:29 PM, Daniel Holbert wrote:
I had a similar thought, but I think it's too late for such telemetry to be effective. The vast majority of users who are affected will have already stopped using Firefox, or will immediately do so, as soon as they discover that their webmail, bank, google, facebook, etc. don't work.
That's a valid point for the first batch of users that is hit with the issue on day one. (Aside: I wonder what the preponderant behavior will be when Chrome also starts choking on those sites.) It'll be interesting to see whether there's a detectable decline in user count that correlates with the beginning of the year.
At the same time, I know that Google tends to measure quite a bit about Chrome's behavior. Lacking our own numbers, perhaps we reach out to them and ask if they're willing to share what they know.
In any case, people install new things all the time. While it is too late to catch the large wave of users who are running into the problem this week, it would be nice to have data about this problem on an ongoing basis.
(We could have used this sort of telemetry before Jan 1 if we'd forseen this potential problem. I don't blame us for not forseeing this, though.)
You're correct: given our current habits, it's understandable that no one thought to measure this. I think there's an object lesson to be learned here.
Mozilla has a clear and stated intention to be more data driven in how we do things. One of the points that Benjamin Smedberg has been trying to drive home is that data collection is everyone's job. In the same way that we would never land code without thinking about how to test it, we need to develop a mindset in which we don't land code without considering whether and how to measure it. It's not a perfect analogy, since many things won't need specific new metrics, but it should be part of the mental checklist: "did I think about whether we need to measure anything about this feature?"
If just asking that question were part of our culture, I'm certain we would have thought of landing exactly this kind telemetry as part of the same patch that disabled SHA-1; or, even better, in advance of it.
-- Adam Roach Principal Platform Engineer a...@mozilla.com +1 650 903 0800 x863 _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
