May 2010 Archives

Today marks 10 years of continuous full-time employment working on Mozilla.

I still can't believe I get to work with so many amazing people. It's pretty much the best job ever.

Thank you to all the Mozillians that have made this such a wonderful decade.

A special thanks to Mitchell Baker, our Chief Lizard Wrangler, who saw something in me a decade ago and gave me the opportunity to turn a hobby into an awesome career.

I said in a previous post that I thought privacy was hard and that getting it right for an organization like Facebook was a big challenge.

I've changed my mind some after thinking more on the other bits I included in that post.

So, if I was sitting down with the top brass at Facebook, what would I say? I think I'd ask them, "Do you think the default [Facebook privacy] settings are ideal for your children and/or your parents?"

If you polled a representative sample of Facebook users and asked them to describe what of their Facebook experience was available to their friends, networks, all Facebook users, or the whole internet, how close to the truth would they get?

Maybe it's not so hard after all. Maybe it's just a matter of asking the right questions about privacy and making sure the answers are implemented in the product.

If that's the case, then almost all of Facebook's privacy problems could be solved by ensuring that the answer to the first question is "yes", which would no doubt mean significant changes to the current defaults, and that the answer to the second question is "pretty darned close", which would require changes to the privacy controls interface.

So, how about it, Facebook executives?

Another way to think about recent user data for Firefox and Chrome that I posted is to see them as allies for a better Web.

Of course there's friendly competition between the browsers, but if you add up all of the Firefox¹, Chrome², Opera³, and Safari⁴ users, you come up with a pretty big number. How big? Nearly 600 million users.

There may be some overlap between browsers, but I think it's completely reasonable to assert:

There are more than half a billion people using these four amazing and modern browsers right now.

Half a billion is a really big number. It's quite difficult for me to even visualize that many people. Firefox makes up the lion's share of that, about 75%, but when you're thinking about the health and future of the Web rather than the success of individual browser vendors, half a billion users is pretty amazing.

Some people complained about my graphic in the previous post so I've tried again. I hope it's clearer than the last one.

And some other folks have asked more about the holiday dip for Firefox so I'll take a second to offer my best explanation for this and why Chrome doesn't see it.

Firefox has nearly 400 million users this month. That's a lot of people and it includes hundreds of millions of "regular people" who don't live their entire lives online. During the winter holidays there are a few weeks around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years where these "regular people" abandon their computers and spend time with friends and family doing things like shopping and eating and having fun.

When Firefox was still an "alternative" browser with just a few tens of millions of users, a much larger percentage of them were "power users" like you and me who live our lives online and so this drop-off was a lot less recognizable and more localized to the actual holiday days (even a geek has to go out with friends on new years eve, right?)

Chrome is still dominated by the early adopter, power user crowd that spends more time online than offline and that accounts both for the disproportionately large usage:users ratio as well as the lack of a significant dip during times with regular people do leave their computers.

That's my take on it.

update: I've posted a much clearer graph here.

I was watching the Google IO broadcast this morning and saw a cool slide showing Chrome user growth over the better part of the last year. They're rightly proud of going from 30 million users to 70 million users during that time. I grabbed a screenshot of the broadcast:

So, how does that compare to Firefox growth over the same period. Here's what it looks like when you plot Firefox user growth on top of that Chrome chart.

The blue line is Chrome and its numbers are on the left vertical axis. The orange line is Firefox and the numbers for it are on the right vertical axis. Firefox gained just over 100 million users in the same period that Chrome gained just over 40 million users.

(That dip you see in the Firefox line is nothing to worry about. Lots of regular people out there surf quite a bit less during the winter holidays. We see a similar, but far less substantial dip in the summer when lots of folks, especially in Europe, go on vacation.)

This is one of my recent Mozilla t-shirt / poster designs. What do you think?

This is a pretty awesome visualization:

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

So far I've been able to mostly keep up with the changes and "fix" my settings so this doesn't impact me too much. But I'm not your typical user and I'll bet many older users and most new users don't manage privacy controls as well.

I like a lot of the new capabilities that Facebook is building. I'm still a Facebook user. I know and respect a decent number of people working there.

My concern is this: Facebook isn't simply following the lead of an audience that's decreasingly concerned about privacy, (as I suspect they tell themselves.) What they're doing is actually leading an audience to be less concerned about privacy. There's a pretty big difference there and it's that difference that makes me increasingly uncomfortable with Facebook's direction.

So, if I was sitting down with the top brass at Facebook, what would I say? I think I'd ask them, "Do you think these default settings are ideal for your children and/or your parents?"

I also wonder if you polled a representative sample of Facebook users and asked them to describe what of their Facebook experience was available to their friends, networks, all Facebook users, or the whole internet, how close to the truth would they get?

Privacy is hard. It's hard to get right for everyone involved. But there are some basic pieces of privacy that are not so hard and I think that Facebook could do a lot better by asking themselves and their users these simple questions I've offered above.

update: This just in: Belorussian translation, provided by Patricia. Thanks, Patricia!

"One of the best things about HTML is that it's universal."

I couldn't have said it better and I applaud Scribd for embracing and pushing the Open Web forward.

Thanks Scribd team! You just earned my business.