poll results
I've done a quick tally of the poll responses. This is about as unscientific as you can possibly get and you'd be ill-served to trust even my counting abilities but I'm sure you all are just dying to see whether you're in the majority or not so here it is:
At the time of posting, there were 44 responses to the study that included a clear first line indication of which group the respondent belonged to.
- 09% I never install extensions. (4 people)
- 16% I rarely try extensions and never use them regularly. (7 people)
- 39% I install and use one to three extensions regularly. (17 people)
- 36% I install and use more than three extensions. (16 people)
It appears that about 3/4ths of respondents use extensions regularly and while it's not reflected in the summary of results presented here, my feeling after reading through the discussion was that most people who use extensions, install and use several. Given the sample size, the margin of error is probably about ±99%, and given that I did the math on my fingers, any numbers greater than 10 are probably completely wrong ;-) so I wouldn't take too much from these poll results.
That being said, I did find the commentary on specific extensions used to be quite interesting. Again, this is completely unscientific and I collated the responses in about 2 minutes so don't feel slighted if your favorite extension got misrepresented:
At the time of this posting, about 20 extensions were mentioned by at least three respondents.
- Live HTTP Headers (11)
- Tabbrowse Extensions (11)
- Flash Click to View (10)
- Linky (10)
- Optimoz (7)
- AdBlock (6)
- Web Developer (6)
- Download Statusbar (5)
- RSS Reader Panel (5)
- All-In-One Gestures (4)
- Calendar (4)
- ChromEdit (4)
- EditCSS (4)
- Compact Menu (3)
- Google Bar (3)
- Link Toolbar (3)
- PNH Developer's Toolbar (3)
- Statusbar Clock (3)
- Tabbrowser Preferences (3)
- Text / Plain (3)
- User Agent Switcher (3)
Looking over the list, it seems to me like web development tools (27), making changes to the behavior of tabbed browsing (14), blocking ads (16), and surfing with mouse gestures (11), are the most desired (to those that responded) features. I'd say we're a pretty geeky crowd ;-)
Has anyone looked at the mozdev.org download logs recently? Could you tell us how this survey compares to the download numbers? Are people that read my weblog radically different in their browser and extension usage than the typical Mozilla (product) users? Are there similar polls in the mozillaZine Forums? How do they compare? What do you all think of these results? And thanks to everyone that responded!
Posted by asa at October 28, 2003 12:10 PM