1259510 - record usage of the search service's update feature

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Search, defect, P3)

Description

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

We don't know any real case of the search service's update feature being used and we assume it's not actually useful, but removing it completely without checking this assumption first is scary, so let's collect data with Telemetry.

Comment 1

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Attachment: WIP

Comment 2

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=a7420c099b4e

Comment 3

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Attachment: record usage of the search service's update feature, r?

Requesting review from Drew for the code, and Benjamin for the data collection.

Comment 4

[Drew Willcoxon :adw]

Comment on attachment 8734861 [details] [diff] [review]
record usage of the search service's update feature, r?

Review of attachment 8734861 [details] [diff] [review]:
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Hmm, I didn't even know OpenSearch has an update feature.  That's kind of neat.  Guess I never noticed all the update-related code in nsSearchService.js.  Anyway, I agree that if we want to remove it, we should see how much it's used first.

Comment 5

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Comment on attachment 8734861 [details] [diff] [review]
record usage of the search service's update feature, r?

I strongly encourage you to make this an opt-out metric. We know that search engines are variable by locale and many locales are not well-represented in beta. There's a clear user benefit to measuring this temporarily.

I do wish the description were clearer about what/when this was recorded. For example: "Recorded once per session near startup: records true/false whether the search service has engines with update URLs."

Are you sure that you don't need to know *which* engines have update URLs? Or are you concerned about the privacy implications of collecting that?

Comment 6

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

Attachment: Patch v2

Made the probes opt-out and updated the descriptions.

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg [:bsmedberg] from comment #5)

> Are you sure that you don't need to know *which* engines have update URLs?
> Or are you concerned about the privacy implications of collecting that?

I would certainly be interested in knowing which engines do have update URLs, but indeed the reason for not collecting them is privacy.

We suspect that this update feature has almost never been used. If our guess is correct, after seeing the data we should be able to confidently drop the update code. If we discover that there's significant usage of it, we'll either want to add more detailed probes to better understand what's going on, or decide to just keep the feature as is (and possibly improve its test coverage).

Comment 7

[Florian Quèze [:florian]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/fx-team/rev/0cfa4f8c142913e697706ec92bd48fb90ff3cf53
Bug 1259510 - record usage of the search service's update feature, r=adw,bsmedberg.

Comment 8

[Wes Kocher (:KWierso) (Not reading bugmail; email directly if needed)]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/0cfa4f8c1429