1185024 - Gather Homepage Value with FHR

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox Health Report Graveyard :: Data Collection, defect)

Description

[Francesco Polizzi [:fpolizzi]]

Background:
According to projections using data from FHR and Testpilot, only a small percentage of all users have about:home set as their default homepage.

We currently have a test that will relate a change in the default homepage with search volume and usage over time, but we do not yet have the ability to see whether a user has switched their homepage setting away from the default (bug #1184279).

It is our hypothesis that when users switch their homepage away from about:home and about:newtab, they are less engaged with the product, and will search less/be retained less often. We would like to test this hypothesis with FHR data.


Requirements:
To gather true or false values for each setting from users via FHR:
1. About:home set as homepage
2. About:newtab set as homepage
3. About:blank set as homepage
4. Other set as homepage

In order to respect user privacy, any homepage values outside of Firefox Pages (about:home, about:newtab, and about:blank) should not be explicitly gathered. Every value gathered should simply be true or false. This data will allow us to map homepage settings in relation to search volume and usage overtime via FHR.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

There is no option to make about:newtab as your homepage without typing it in manually, so let's discount that possibility.

The rest of this is already done in unified telemetry for 41 via environment.settings.userPrefs:

103   ["browser.startup.homepage", TelemetryEnvironment.RECORD_PREF_STATE],
104   ["browser.startup.page", TelemetryEnvironment.RECORD_PREF_VALUE],

I don't know whether you want to mark this bug as WORKSFORME or use it to track development of the reporting infrastructure.

I have an alternate hypothesis, that "When Nightly start: show my windows and tabs from last time" is going to be a popular choice, especially for more experienced users who use pinned tabs or often browse with multiple tabs.

Comment 2

[Chris More [:cmore]]

In Fx41+ on 9/22/2015, will these prefs be sent for all Firefox users on all channels or only for specific channels or only for users who have opted-in?

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

They will be sent for everyone. Note that it's only included if the user has a non-default value, to limit payload size.

Comment 4

[Chris More [:cmore]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #3)
> They will be sent for everyone. Note that it's only included if the user has
> a non-default value, to limit payload size.

Cool and makes sense to only set the field when the value is something other than the default way Firefox comes.