Firefox Heatmap - How People Use Firefox's Interface

This was based on an old study from Firefox 4 Beta when the status bar was still on by default. (The study was in July 2010, when Firefox 4.0b1 was out; the status bar was replaced about four months later in Firefox 4.0b7.)

The "Customizations" number just means that 95% of users had the status bar enabled (i.e., did nothing and ended up with with the default setting) while the other 5% customized Firefox by disabling the status bar. It says nothing about how many users "used" (interacted with) the status bar.

Customization is not a good measure of usefulness. We know that 97% of participants never used the RSS button in the main toolbar in Firefox 4.0b1, but that doesn't mean that they all took the time to customize their toolbar to remove the button.

This may be due to settings carrying over from an older Firefox install. In my experience, Firefox has been quite good at not clobbering settings unless they decide to remove the feature entirely. I had forgotten they added "tabs on top" until I saw this, which actually reminded me to try it out.

You can find results from the more recent 2012 heatmap study here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap-study-20...

The scroll bar numbers make me further believe that OS X Lion's scroll bars are a bad design. My computer is not a tablet... saving ~10 of 1920 pixels is not something I needed or wanted.

What jumped out at me was the 71% for the reload button. Unless they've changed the layout since I customized my copy, the reload button defaults to being a tiny button at the right end of the awesome bar. I moved mine to where Chrome has it and these numbers indicate that a lot of others have done the same. That or Mozilla moved it and I naturally didn't notice.

Ubuntu Unity has some neat tricks to make scrollbars more usable [1]. Instead of requiring users to hone in on the up/down arrows or the "thumb", hovering anywhere near the scrollbar brings up a widget that compactly encapsulates all this functionality. I don't care for Unity enough to start using it day to day, but this feature struck me as clever though radical.

Yeah, don't people use their mouse wheel or two finger scrolling on the trackpad?

I notice this all the time with your 'normal' user. The scroll bar is quite possibly the most horrific unfriendly control. It's just too narrow. Those users that don't have that much control of a pointer, struggle with scroll bars and small buttons / drop downs etc.

I like the Apple way of placing controls on the left, but having a scroll bar on the right negates a lot of the benefit of doing so.

Having said that they are quite handy as page length / where you are indicators.

Try CTRL + L to jump into the location bar (that's if you have a keyboard.)

With regard to middle clicking, I assume you mean a scroll wheel on a mouse. Which some users still don't have! (I know it seems hard to believe.) Also trackpad users need to dupe this functionality somehow, and some haven't picked up on the shortcuts.

I'm a web developer, and I use the back and forward buttons* all the time, especially if I'm being lazy. For example, if I'm shopping for something, rather than opening a whole bunch of tabs, I'll just bounce back and forth using forward and back. I think I do this especially when I'm farther away from what I want, and as I start to zero in more, I start opening more tabs at once so I can compare.

Also, from some usability studies we've done at my job, it seems that most people are almost completely unable to deal with window management. We rolled out functionality for a while that broke the back button (poorly-implemented infinite scroll) and found that our pages performed very poorly, because people would lose their place and just leave. We kind of had assumed that most people would use tabs, but that turned out not to be the case at all.

Anecdotally, watching my mom use the computer recently was enlightening. She's been using computers longer than I have, and is very savvy with certain things (e.g., she still knows how to use Excel to solve problems better than I do, and I know Excel pretty damn well.) She seems to use browser tabs sort of like "processes", rather than "threads". For example, she'll have her "hotel search" tab, her "rental car" tab, and her "flight search" tab, and within those tabs, she'll stick to that topic, using the back buttons to look at different pages. When I switched spots with her, and started spawning a whole bunch of tabs from each tab, she started to lose track of things.

* Edit: actually, I almost never use the buttons themselves, but I use the functionality as I described. I use mouse buttons, gestures or shortcut keys, rather than the buttons.

It is interesting that the percentage of people using the back button decreases with expertise (98% for beginner vs 92% for advanced).

I find it more amazing how many people use the forward button. I think I've probably used the forward button less than 10 times in the 18 years I've been using the web.

To the 60% of users who use it - when do you find it useful?

You're right about the bias. If you use the filters to view only data from self-identified "Beginner" users, then the address bar usage is significantly lower and the search bar usage is higher (but still not as high as the address bar).

The data is from FF4 beta. So I think you're right, these are not your average users.

Could it be that people search using the URL box? It's the biggest, most familiar box, so maybe beginners users just type into it.

I am. Chrome on OSX. I'm not sure if that's intentional so you can see what exactly was being clicked on, or a bug.

The Firefox button is shown when the menubar is hidden (View: Toolbars: Menu Bar, on Linux). The menubar is hidden by default on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

On Windows the Firefox button is orange and is integrated into the window's titlebar. This is not yet implemented on Linux, so on Linux it just appears in the tab bar.