Closed Bug 273241 Opened 20 years ago Closed 7 years ago

Add logging facility to help decide usability issues

Categories

(Core :: Preferences: Backend, enhancement)

Product:
Core
Component:
Preferences: Backend
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

People

(Reporter: bugzillamozilla, Unassigned)

References

Details

It is safe to say that many of the default prefs in Mozilla applications are
questionable and that there is currently no way to tell what alternative setting
would best suit the majority. To solve this problem, we could log how users
actually interact with the software - for example, do they immediately click
Back (in panic?) after a groupmark replaces all their tabs? Do they just forget
the previous tabs and keep on surfing? No one in Bug 159431 could come up with
hard evidence to back up or dispute either of these scenarios. A log would
provide an empirical answer to this and other questions.

Other than the highly debatable behavior mentioned above, there are currently
132 open bugs that could benefit from such a feature. See
http://snipurl.com/DefaultPrefs

Prog.
CCing mpt, who seems to be receiving bugmail again (at least some of it). 

Prog.
Blocks: 134649
cc'ing brettw and darin, as this ties in to the instrumentation work they're doing
s/brettw/bryner/
The filer's request is just talking about logging to gather empirical usage data; it has nothing to do with "machine learning." Removing that part of the summary so that it won't scare people off...
Summary: Better default prefs through machine learning (add logging facility to help decide usability issues) → Add logging facility to help decide usability issues
great idea, do this for product testing, and if it is released into the public then it might be better as a voluntary pref, as it would create at least some overhead.  FAIK, maybe scare people that privacy is being compromised, kinda like M$ and Sony have done...
(Filter "spam" on 'prefs-nobody-20080612'.)
Assignee: prefs → nobody
QA Contact: prefs
QA Contact: preferences → preferences-backend
we have some telemetry environment way to monitor this, but this particular bug is not useful any more.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 7 years ago
Resolution: --- → INCOMPLETE
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