Users and testers

Trevor swiftly fixed bug 424993, so now I can talk about users and testers of Firefox 2 and 3, per locale, per platform. Thanks. This is data over the last 7 days, so it's not dead-on representative, and it won't cover new locales in B5, but only the end-game in B4. As we're constantly ramping up in testers, that's a good time area, and it will remove those users that just shortly checked B4 due to the media rush. Thus, in particular for localizations, it should be much more representative of "satisfied testers".

As always, I'm giving you an exhibit of the data, not included here, as I had no idea how to make wp do that. Check the output on active testers, March 19th-26th.

There are some interesting artifacts. Like, I doubt we have really that much of an overrepresentation of linux testers, it's just that most of the fx2s out there are distro fx2s that we don't see. Fx3s are of course different. In average, we had a 14 per mille ratio between fx3 b4 users and fx2 users. There are only few localizations "overtested", most prominently Gujarati, which is just a bad signal to noise ratio. We do have a few undertested ones, starting with Greek and Macedonian (coincidence?), both at 3 per mille. Low-noise high testing ratios come in for Korean (fair noise?), traditional Chinese, and Russian. Making the cut there somewhat arbitrarily.

What that gives? It gives us focus for our testing, and it's a nice occasion to say:

Beta 5 will come out, with yet more localizations, so whoever you know that could enjoy a Firefox 3 Beta in localized version, send them over to the download page and ask them to send in their feedback.