Tuesday, May 11, 2010

The Tab Power Law for Firefox

Mozilla has released its 2010 Q1 analyst report on the state of the internet. The report was created to "provide a high-level view of key metrics on an ongoing basis and to share some interesting insights". Well, its a little short at 12 well-spaced pages, and the summary bullets are not that exciting
  • Firefox’s worldwide market share hovering near 30%
  • Firefox adoption is growing most dramatically in Russia
  • People start their work day earliest in Hawaii and Wyoming; latest start to the day is in New York
  • People in South American like applying Personas (themes) to their browser; people in Antarctica love add-ons
For me the most interesting observation was the number of open tabs people work with in FireFox, as shown in the graph below.

image
Most people use 2 to 3 tabs, however the maximum observed value was over 600! Also, since the median is 2.9, over half the people use almost 3 or more tabs. The graph above clearly has a power law structure, and in this case, quite a long tail.

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