1570155 - How many people use FTP?

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Data Science :: General, task, P3)

Description

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

Brief Description of the request (required):

I want to know how many Firefox users use FTP. This includes navigating to an ftp:// URI, or downloading something from an ftp:// URI.

Business purpose for this request (required):

Bug 1568640 is suggesting that Firefox remove FTP support specifically from Android. This is based on Google doing the same from Chrome, and the linked Chrome bug shows some very low usage numbers. However, before blindly following Google, I'd like to understand how many Firefox users this would impact.

In a more general sense, it would be nice to understand the usage of all protocols (FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.) and be able to segment that data by OS and platform.

Requested timelines for the request or how this fits into roadmaps or critical decisions (required):

Not time critical.

Links to any assets (e.g Start of a PHD, BRD; any document that helps describe the project):

Name of Data Scientist (If Applicable):

Please note if it is found that not enough information has been given this will delay the triage of this request.

Comment 1

[Tim Smith (inactive) 👨‍🔬 [:tdsmith]]

Is there a probe that measures this?

I recall that you asked in #fx-metrics if we had any way to measure this; I took a look and didn't find any probes that gave us counts by URL scheme or that were specific to FTP. Unless you've identified something that'll work, this would require implementing a probe, and that would have to belong to an engineering team.

FWIW, collecting measurements in Fennec is, unfortunately, unwieldy; the bulk of our telemetry is disabled by default in Fennec release builds.

Comment 2

[Darkspirit]

(Jan Andre Ikenmeyer [:darkspirit] from bug 1568640 comment 7)

I missed that Fennec Nightly and Stable have both been migrated to 68esr. So this change should only affect GeckoView & Fenix for now.

The hope is that Chromium could have disabled FTP by the time Fenix finally ships on Stable.

(Patrick McManus [:mcmanus] from bug 1090762 comment 4)

this patch doesn't give us any comparables (pct of sessions for example..) its just a raw hit count - which I don't see how it helps us.

don't get me wrong, there is a lot of code in the ftp directory that is lightly used and highly risky.. it would be good to get rid of. I worry about the competitive aspect.

bug 1090762 could be useful to determine a deprecation date for FTP on Desktop.

Comment 3

[Mike Conca [:mconca]]

(In reply to Tim Smith 👨‍🔬 [:tdsmith] from comment #1)

Is there a probe that measures this?

No. :darkspirit conveniently linked to the needed engineering bug.

Sorry for repeating the request from #fx-metrics here, but I wanted to follow the correct process.

Comment 4

[Christian Holler (:decoder)]

Just in case we end up implementing Telemetry here, I would like to point to https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1574475#c10

It might be worthwhile to implement the probe such that the different types of FTP servers can be measured.

Comment 5

[Tim Smith (inactive) 👨‍🔬 [:tdsmith]]

An initial query showing DAU using FTP from release 71 is here: https://sql.telemetry.mozilla.org/queries/67210/source#170198

The y axis is in percent, so "0.05" is indeed 0.05%, which is not, like, a lot.

It'll be interesting to wait for a while longer and observe how many MAU we have for FTP, since many users who ever use FTP probably? aren't using it daily.

Note that we won't get any data from Fennec with this probe.

Comment 6

[Tim Smith (inactive) 👨‍🔬 [:tdsmith]]

Just to be public with the data we're using in decisionmaking, here's an update from that Jira ticket -- as we might expect, many FTP users do not use FTP every day. About 700k release MAU use FTP to download files at least once, out of about 220 million MAU, or about 0.32%.