549478 - Show statistics about add-ons that are installed together with the add-on in question

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(addons.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Statistics, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Philipp von Weitershausen [:philikon]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6
Build Identifier: 

The AMO statistics dashboard already presents a lot of useful information about add-ons. Particularly useful metrics are the operating system and Firefox/Thunderbird version. They give add-on developers an idea of which platforms and client versions they should support and which ones can be dropped without losing too many users. After all, supporting an outdated version of Firefox can be quite a maintenance burden.

An additional metric along the same lines is the set of add-ons that are installed together with the add-on in question. Making sure that one's add-on stays compatible with all third party extensions is obviously a good idea, but in reality one would like to focus on the most popular ones. Seeing which ones are typically installed together with one's own add-on (and which ones are rare combinations) might help reduce the maintenance burden. It might also give extension developers additional information on which add-ons to test compatibility with in the future.

It appears that AMO already collects this data anyway (to show the "Often used with…" list), so it might just be a matter of making it available in the statistics dashboard.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Justin Scott [:fligtar]]

The "Often used with" list is actually populated by collections. We don't currently record the data you're asking for via update pings, as that would require setting a cookie to identify individual users, and we only do statistics in aggregate.

However, in the coming months we plan to have an opt-in recommendation engine where users can opt-in to sending us their installed add-on data in exchange for recommendations of add-ons they might like. That data could be used for this request.

Comment 2

[Carlo Alberto Ferraris]

Knowing which extensions are actually used most often together with mine would really help compatibility efforts.

Comment 3

[Wil Clouser [:clouserw]]

Thanks for filing this.  Due to resource constraints we are closing bugs which we won't realistically be able to fix.  If you have a patch that applies to this bug please reopen.

For more info see http://micropipes.com/blog/2014/09/24/the-great-add-on-bug-triage/