[LINK] Firefox Health Report

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

<https://blog.mozilla.org/metrics/firefox-health-report/fhr-faq/>

FAQ for FHR.

1.What is Firefox Health Report? 

Firefox Health Report (FHR) is an upcoming Firefox feature that enables 
users to optimize their Firefox configuration and will help us build a 
more excellent browser. As a non-profit dedicated to making the Web 
better, Mozilla will use FHR to help us improve performance, fix problems 
and let users see how their browsing experience compares against other 
instances of Firefox. FHR will also provide the Mozilla Project a source 
of open data for improving and prioritizing development. 

FHR will collect a series of technical indicators about the Firefox 
browser and periodically send this data to Mozilla. This information 
includes stability and performance information about the browser and its 
environment. Users will be able to disable FHR or delete data associated 
with their browser at any time. 

FHR will power a dashboard built into Firefox for users to visualize how 
their browser performs in comparison to other browser configurations and 
what they can do to improve its performance. For example, they can see 
whether a performance problem is unique to their installation or related 
to a particular add-on, and whether upgrading to the next
version is likely to solve their problem.

2.When will Firefox Health Report (FHR) be rolled out and how will users 
be notified? 

We intend to include FHR in an upcoming Nightly build soon. When it 
appears, users will get an explanation of what it does and will have the 
option to disable it. We’ll evaluate and adjust FHR on Nightly before 
moving it through our broader release channels. 

Our Nightly channel is considered our platform for developers and Mozilla 
contributors to try out very early features of Firefox and provide us 
with feedback, before we move them to our Aurora, Beta and then the 
General release of Firefox. Not all features in Nightly make it to the 
final Firefox product.

3.Why is Mozilla creating Firefox Health Report (FHR)? 

FHR will help us identify, understand, and fix problems more quickly, and 
will ultimately help us build a better, faster, stronger product for the 
hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world.

4.How will Firefox Health Report (FHR) work? 

Here’s how FHR will collect data from a newly activated browser: 

On day one it will submit one day’s worth of FHR data, “document A”. On 
day two, the browser submits a document with data for day 1 and 
2, “document B”, with an instruction to delete “document A” on the 
server. The submission from day 3 instructs the server to 
remove “document B” and so on. Each Firefox browser will store the last 
copy of the collected data, including per-day data points going back up 
to 180 days. This way, each browser instance is only represented once on 
our servers. 

We plan to aggregate data as we receive it from Firefox and delete 
individual browser data after 180 days. 

We will not log IP addresses in our system, however, we will convert a 
user’s IP address to a country and store that data element. If a country 
does not have many users, we put requests received from that country into 
an “everywhere else” geo-bucket, further de-identifying that data. 

Users wishing to troubleshoot a potential Firefox problem will only see 
their own data in comparison to all Firefox browser instances.

5.How will Firefox Health Report make the browsing experience better for 
users? 

We will use FHR information to make Firefox better. It will allow us to:

◦Enable users to examine their browser’s performance or stability against 
other configurations of Firefox. This will allow them, and the Mozilla 
support community, to find and fix problems with their installation.

◦Accurately measure performance and stability trends for the majority of 
Firefox installations. This will help us determine whether problems we 
see reported are isolated to specific browser configurations (e.g., 
issues associated with certain combinations of add-ons or a particular 
version of Firefox).

◦Determine what configuration of add-ons and different Firefox versions 
are contributing to performance or stability problems. For example, FHR 
data would have helped us address the recent issues with crashes in Flash 
content much more quickly by knowing the exact conditions under which the 
problem was being experienced. Diagnosing exactly how a problem occurs is 
half the battle in finding a fix.

6.How have you acquired product-related data in the past to help improve 
Firefox? 

Firefox users can enable some data gathering tools, like Telemetry and 
TestPilot that carry out specific tests on parts of the code base. The 
Firefox ‘Help’ menu also offers users a chance to submit written feedback 
about their experience with Firefox that goes directly to our customer 
support team. 

Firefox also periodically checks to see: 

a) whether there is a newer version of Firefox to upgrade to , and 
whether the computer is signed up for automatic updates. 

b) whether there are any harmful or outdated add-ons or plug-ins 
installed that Firefox should disable (e.g., when a plugin causes Firefox 
to crash on startup or contains a critical security vulnerability). 

Finally, we have a crash reporting feature that, when the user agrees, 
sends technical information back to Mozilla if a crash occurs. More 
information about Mozilla’s data practices regarding Firefox can be found 
in the Mozilla Firefox Privacy Policy. 

Over the years, Mozilla has relied on various combinations of the above 
data to determine the number of installations of Firefox and try to 
identify usage patterns or correlate performance issues with changes in 
these data types.

7.How is Firefox Health Report (FHR) different from how your competitors 
get product feedback?
 
We believe that Mozilla’s approach to FHR, which was created in 
consultation with our community, is a great model for balancing a user 
centric feature with user privacy. FHR is designed to avoid keeping a 
long-running record of data correlated to a particular browser. Because 
FHR makes it clear what information is collected, makes the information 
directly visible within Firefox, explains why this data is important and 
provides users with complete control over deleting their own data, we 
hope to establish new best practices that can be followed by other 
developers and our competitors. 

8.What data will Firefox Health Report send to Mozilla?
 
Mozilla is a non-profit dedicated to making the Web better and believes 
being open is the best policy. We don’t want to build a long history of 
Firefox Health Report (FHR) submissions for any one instance of the 
browser. Rather, we want to collect product data in the open that will 
help users optimize Firefox and help Mozilla to build a more excellent 
browser. FHR is different from our Telemetry engineering monitoring 
system which is designed to analyze very specific and detailed data about 
the performance of specific portions of Firefox browser code and is 
enabled by users. 

FHR will send a limited set of data that is relevant to improving the 
quality and capabilities of Firefox. 

For example, FHR will send data to Mozilla on things like: operating 
system, PC/Mac, number of processors, Firefox version, the number and 
type of add-ons. The data collected by FHR is tied to a Document ID that 
corresponds to a browser installation (explained below) so that the data 
can be correlated across a limited window of time. 

FHR will not collect email addresses or track website visits, which 
services users are logged into, downloads, or search details, nor will it 
collect other information which directly identifies you as a user. 

9.Will Firefox Health Report be rolled out in Firefox for Android? 

The initial release of FHR will be for desktop versions of Firefox only. 
In time, we expect we’ll want to collect this type of diagnostic data for 
Firefox on mobile platforms as well. 

10.Can you tell it’s “me” directly from the data you collect? 

No. The data we will collect is specific to a given browser instance (the 
set of configurations used associated with a single instance of the 
browser). 

If multiple users browse with the same browser, their activity is 
indistinguishable. If a user uses multiple browser instances on the same 
or different computers, the information is collected and submitted 
separately for each browser instance with no common identifier. 

Mozilla automatically destroys the link between browser instance and data 
collected after 180 days of having that information. 

Users can also disable FHR at any time and remove information that is 
identified to a specific browser. 

11.Does Do Not Track disable Firefox Health Report? 

Firefox Health Report (FHR) is separate from Do Not Track. 

Do Not Track is a Firefox feature that lets you express a preference not 
to be tracked by third parties online. When the feature is enabled, 
Firefox will tell advertising networks, data brokers and other websites 
that you do not want to be tracked. 

FHR is a proposed feature of Firefox that will not track how a user uses 
the browser. If you activate Do Not Track you will still be contributing 
information to FHR unless you specifically disable it. 

12.Are you selling the data you collect? 

No. 

13.Will FHR align with your policy of putting users in control of their 
own information? 

We believe in giving users power over data, even data like this that 
isn’t personally identifiable or linkable to our users. FHR will give 
Firefox users control over data submitted by their browser as a result of 
this feature. Users can use FHR data to better understand their browser’s 
performance or stability by comparing it to that of aggregate data from 
other browser configurations. At any time users can disable the feature 
or delete data associated with their browser.

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Cheers,
Stephen