How much AI do you want in your browser:
( ) None
( ) Zero
( ) I want my browser to automatically close any page that mentions AI
Which of these options do you prefer:
( ) having an AI assistant integrated into the browser
( ) getting kicked in the balls by elon musk
A genuinely tough decision
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hi we’re the marketing team and we already decided what we want to do, and we can make up whatever data you want to see for us to justify it!
More like
-
2x slower browser
-
AI
-
i don’t like how they used “want least”, it means three very different things:
- i want this but it’s not the thing i want the most
- i don’t care for this
- oh god fuck no
That’s why they did it in sets of three. They could just give every user a blank text box for every option, but doing it this way makes it far easier to analyze the data in bulk.
yea, but that gives you less info
this way, you can’t really differentiate from a feature that people want, but not as a priority, VS a feature that people don’t want ever
It makes the survey easier to complete by users in small steps. Huge surveys scare users away.
The survey design accounts for this. See https://lemm.ee/comment/13835466.
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Very weird, because it’s not sorted alphabetically. That means there is a bias in the sorting, because the first option is default and the best option for most users.
They are sorted at random for each visitor.
Oh I meant this as a joke, to place Germany as the best answer.^^ But regardless, good to know its random. Probably doesn’t even matter.
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could just be the countries with the most users or where they’ve seen a recent trend, up or down, in local market share.
I didn’t see that question, but all 3 of those countries seem to rank pretty high on the country demographics for FOSS that I’ve seen (as in when individual FOSS projects do demographics surveys of their users)
It has always been
Which of the following attributes would you most want your new browser to have, and which would you want least?
Twice as slow as your current browser
Is that a joke?
Control question probably, to check if you actually read the questions.
Makes sense. What about those who click that option as a joke? Maybe discount all other replies from that person because of that too?
I mean, fair?
Or what if they don’t click it by joke, but because they actually prefer a 2x slower browser over such a feature?
lol, yeah. 👍
I was doing a political poll just the other day and the third or fourth question was a color question like: “Which of the following is associated most with a ripe banana?”
I debated because I really disliked another option in there (I think it was split-screen for AI or something stupid) and it felt like it was designed to make me not rank something else I didn’t like as least desired.
For me that was together with
A privacy-respecting AI assistant that makes your browser smarter by learning how you use it
So I don’t really care how slow the browser is, as long as it doesn’t have an AI “assistant” that is monitoring my browser usage
I wouldn’t mind an AI assistant, as long as it’s fully local.
Why would you want that in a browser? We have LLMs you can run local.
Can you let me have my own preferences? Am I allowed?
Not at the cost of my experience. It should be a optional feature if anything
Agreed. If you don’t want to use it it should just stay out of the way.
It’s an Inferred importance method, as other users have commented it is likely that there are some calibration metrics in there. MaxDiff is the name of the approach if you want to check out more.
Mozilla is weighting on the data. They found people love AI more than a slow browser.
Everyone’s here complaining about the randomised questions when I’m just curious why location options are “Germany”, " Brazil", “USA”, or " Somewhere we don’t care about".
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Those are simply the most significant Firefox user bases.
Privacy law considerations. Germany is downright good for its citizens. The US has a round about spying industry. Brazil basically has mandatory mass surveilance. Everyone else’s laws are more or less the same. Not identical. But Mozilla can meet their requirements pretty trivially
Everyone else’s laws are more or less the same.
The EU and UK have almost identical privacy laws - the GDPR, so Germany having exceptional privacy laws doesn’t hold up. As far as other privacy laws go I think France has a lead on Germany with approximately the same population, so privacy law can’t be the main consideration.
Constituent states within the EU can have more laws on top of the EU’s laws. Maybe things have changed since the last time I had to implement code to respect these laws, but as of two years ago Germany and Sweden were the two countries where we had to make the most considerations with Germany being VERY strong
This is one of the weirder surveys I’ve ever taken, I hope they know what they’re doing.
They have lot there minds just like the entire tech industry
You folks are really exaggerating. How is this survey weird? The random questions in groups of 3 make it easy to compare 3 features instead of rating 60 different features by most wanted to least wanted. In aggregate from thousands of replies, they can sort all answers.
I feel like most of these people were way over analyzing the questions. No reason to look for in depth meaning of possible answers, just answer them and take them at face value.
I wonder what percentage of people chose “Least important” for “Do you want another fucking annoying pointless AI assistant?”
Do they publish any of the data from these surveys or use it as an excuse to remove more useful features?
“We listen to our community, so now we’re removing
about: configaccess from stable desktop builds to match the mobile version to provide uniform builds, making problems easier to replicate and also provide better security for all. Please use beta or nightly builds for tinkering.”Removed by mod
Duh. I’d rather drink bleach.
Honestly it the world gets bad enough it could get that extreme…
“We found that users wanted AI over a 2x slower browser”
Damn, i was hoping for them to make it slower!
Bring back PWA!!
Sadly, they’re probably thinking mobile.
PWAs were a feature I marked “want least”. I don’t like a cluttered home screen, I’d much rather just use bookmarks.
The reason I mention PWA for desktop is very different from mobile, but for either, a PWA can live anywhere, it’s just a menu less browser with the site’s icon vs the firefox one. Handy for sites with no apps that you want to be able to task switch independently for. They dont have to be on a home screen or desktop.
Granted, the wording of the question would make one think so.
Yes, it’s a fancy way to save a tab. I just leave the tab open. Not a feature I want, so not something I want them to waste limited development time on. It’d be nice if it were through the bookmarks interface, so booarks could save state & history the way tabs do, but that’s not what’s proposed so I’d rather not have this. PWAs are a workaround to make up for the limitations of bookmarks.
Don’t PWAs already exist and work on mobile? I think they’d work on desktop PWAs again then
Nope, just shortcuts.
@neme loaded questions are loaded.
The “Want most” to “Want least” scale is loaded AF.
Where is the option for “I don’t want any of these things”?
Edit: Yeah, fuck that. That survey is bullshit. I stopped bothering to give answers due to the multi-choice questions seeming like a way for Mozilla to have a wank about itself.
This is fairly standard survey design, I believe. They’re not looking to know which features are wanted in general; they want to know their relative popularity. The sets you’re presented are randomised (i.e. we don’t all get to see the same sets), which allows them to get a ranked list of lots of potential features, while only having to run ten survey questions per participant.
If you get a set with three features that everyone likes or dislikes at about the same level, then it doesn’t really matter want you answer: they’ll all end up at the top or bottom of the list, respectively. Because each of those options also get presented as part of different sets to different users, where different answers can win out.
You’re bang on. It’s called MaxDiff. I use it frequently in my line of work to prioritise product or service messaging with panel data. It’s better in some cases to use Inferred preference rather than stated, but generally good to keep the options comparable in “size” of offer.
I would never interpret a MaxDiff model low end result as “wow, 5% of people want slower browsers.” Instead I’m focusing on the top cluster. As with any model, they’re only ever so accurate. Don’t read into the questions too much.
The problem with this design is, if people do not care, then they will give random answers, if they don’t have the option to not care. Also this would be important information for Mozilla too, if many people do not care about a specific question. So I feel like they should have done that. But, who am I…
Any uncertainty would be filtered out by the scale of people answering
Presumably if people don’t care, they don’t fill in the survey. But as an extra failsafe, they’ve also included the feature “twice as slow as your current browser”. If you rank that high, then your result can probably be discarded.
But yeah, this design has worked well for many other surveys, so presumably it’ll work well for this one. They’re the experts :)
Presumably if people don’t care, they don’t fill in the survey.
That’s not what I said. People care about the survey and they do a favor to Mozilla with it. And if a question does not have the answer they want to give, then it becomes a problem. It’s a different scenario than what you were saying.
But yeah, this design has worked well for many other surveys, so presumably it’ll work well for this one. They’re the experts :)
With that attitude and without acknowledging a problem, it won’t get better. If they were the experts, then they wouldn’t need a survey. But its easy to discredit any credit with that dumb argument.
They’re the experts in survey-taking, not in knowing what the users want - the users are experts in that. Hence the survey.
That remark was basically a reformulation of and agreeing with your “But, who am I…”
@Vincent couldn’t finish the survey purely because of the questions suggesting that I should “want” something.
Perhaps if they asked the question differently, they’d have gotten a completed survey from me.
I can’t answer loaded questions.
The samples they get are meaningless if only people who complete the survey are counted.
The fact that I couldn’t select none of them and move forward, meant something: Jerk Mozilla off, or don’t.
I chose not to, and I am a Mozilla user!
I’m half-way through the survey right now; and rather than continuing, just stalling because I don’t want to rank another set of three options that I don’t care about. Some of the choices already given were like “well, I guess I’ll pick the feature that I’ve at least thought about using once…” but now it’s just a list of 3 things that I don’t want whatsoever. I’m trying to give useful feedback, but I feel like I’m really just giving noise.
@blind3rdeye it’s a load of crap, isn’t it?
The statisticians may disagree, but they fail to understand that forcing “want” into the situation is not a true reflection of what people care about.
If they had just tweaked that one word, it wouldn’t be as much of a steaming pile of turds that it is.
It’s almost like they want people to not finish the survey, so they can have a warped sample.
I hope my response will get thrown out because I prefer a slower browser over built-in AI based personalization.
It doesn’t seem randomized based on what I have seen
You mean you’ve taken it multiple times and kept seeing the exact same ten sets?
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All those features, and the only one I want is customizable hotkeys. Although I guess I’d also take “browser is twice as fast.”
Which do you prefer:
( ) browser twice as fast
( ) women find you irresistible
( x) browser twice as fast
( ) women find you irresistible
Faster browser any day…
Yes, I want the most for Firefox to be twice as slow as my current browser (Firefox/Fennec)
I hope like hell the sets of questions were randomized, because if they weren’t, they were tweaked by the surveyors beforehand to try and force a particular result.
Like the AI question was paired with some incredibly crappy options like “A browser that runs 2x slower than your current browser”. Obviously they want you to click that option as least wanted and leave the AI development alone (if that wasn’t a randomized grouping).
Similarly, it looked like they were trying to decide which feature to sacrifice in support of AI dev in later questions, because all 3 would be things I enjoy much more than AI, but I have to rate one as least wanted.
EDIT: OK, thanks for all the responses everyone! Looks like my pairing of AI and 2x slower was just a bad random selection inducing extreme paranoia on my part. Very happy to hear that.
They were randomized.
For me ‘2x slower’ was not paired with any AI.My 2x slower was paired with the 2x faster 🤣 guess which one I chose?
It was randomised for me because the 2x slower option didn’t appear with any AI questions for me
This survey is very confusing
My conference in Mozilla is now almost zero
I took the survey and I didn’t like how they occasionally put all shitty features in a group and I had to pick one I wanted and then followed it with all good stuff in a group and I had to say I didn’t want one.
