Mozilla wants users to take part in a survey about browser features

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
  
  Well, getting kicked in the balls is a one-time affair, and I'm done having kids anyway, so I'd go with that.
  
  i guess daddy musk is coming to make my dreams come true
- 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
  
  that question seemed directly made by some software dev that shares my opinion lol
  i picked 2x slower browser over ai because at least if it is gonna be slower im not gonna be harassed by some amalgamation of every incel shitpost on the Internet

What country do you live in: Germany, United States, Brazil, other
What? Weird survey options.
- Data retention would be my guess.
- 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.
- 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
- Someone being funny? BUG

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
- The survey design accounts for this. See https://lemm.ee/comment/13835466.

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.
  
  I forgot those exist and interpreted it as "Would you sacrifice performance for one of these features?"
  Am I stupid?
  
  Makes sense. What about those who click that option as a joke? Maybe discount all other replies from that person because of that too?
  
  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
  
  Yup, I stuck that as "least want." I already marked "2x faster performance" as "most want" on another question, so hopefully it all shakes out in the end.
  
  I wouldn't mind an AI assistant, as long as it's fully local.
- 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.
- Wait, I swear mine said twice as fast. Well I guess I got filtered then. Lol
  
  There were both
  
  I had both.
- 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".
- 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

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.
- It's the "most wanted" language. I don't blame common folks associating "most wanted" with "I want this!" when in fact they don't mean it.
  
  But the language is clear. From these 3 features, choose the one you want the most and the one you want the least 🤔

I wonder what percentage of people chose "Least important" for "Do you want another fucking annoying pointless AI assistant?"
- I hope all of them. If you use firefox you are probably in the minority that has at peast some idea of how unnecessary those are.
- from this comment and the reply, I'm guessing at least 3.

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

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: config access 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."
- Product managers know what KPI's they want to improve, and its almost never survey sentiment results. The survey will be used to justify projects that improve the KPIs they already have. Best case scenario it helps them choose what to work on first, worst case (and most likely) it doesn't matter what the survey says - it's engineered to justify a pet project.
  i.e. Straight out of "how to lie with statistics" - Would you rather drink bleach or add in browser advertisements based on privacy respecting AI categorization of you browsing behavior? ..... The people have spoken and they OVERWHELMINGLY want more monetization in their browser.
  
  Duh. I'd rather drink bleach.
- "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.
- Yeah, some of these questions made more sense for mobile than desktop. For example, I want to split tabs on desktop, but I don't on mobile. Likewise, I don't really care about PWAs on mobile (there's usually an app with a better experience), but I do care on desktop because that isn't a thing on my system (Linux).
  I think it would've been better had they broken them into groups for mobile and desktop.
  
  Desktop PWAs are easy as you can just create a shortcut
- 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.
- Don't PWAs already exist and work on mobile? I think they'd work on desktop PWAs again then
  
  Nope, just shortcuts.

When looking for a new web browser, which feature would you prefer most and which would you prefer least?
A color palette that matches Danny DeVito's armpit hair.
Play the theme to Annie at startup.
Take up all computer resources.
I don't want any of those. Can't we just have a browser that filters all of the popups, junk and advertising?
Nope. You can't progress through the survey without picking one thing you really don't want and at least one of two things you couldn't give a shit less about.
- This one was kinda oof
  
  They needed to have something that might be less appealing than an AI assistant
  
  Oh. I had different sets. I had all 3 options but not against each other. So it seems they're randomized.
  Edit: hadn't read the other replies. People have already figured that out, it seems.
  
  You'd rather have yours twice as slow than a feature you could probably disable? Weird blind hate ngl

Yes, I want the most for Firefox to be twice as slow as my current browser (Firefox/Fennec)

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...

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.

This the most blizzare survey I have ever seen. What is even happening?

Things I want from Firefox/Mozilla, in no particular order:
Just hire the uBlock Origin guy, Chrome doesn't want him
Dissolve the Mozilla Corporation, start a Patreon or whatever
Foxkeh plushie
I am willing to compromise on the "unreasonable" ones 🦊

Bizarre survey yeah but also why is there a mandatory exact age question at the end? Isn't it normal to be able to opt out of demographic questions for surveys? It also lets us say we'd prefer not to say our gender but not our exact year of birth?

PWA ffs

We want a true black-dark mode for OLED. This missing feature is holding me back from going 100% Firefox on mobile (I am only using it for horrible websites that are asking fo the ublock origin treatment.
2022 request for this feature: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/provide-a-black-dark-mode-in-firefox-mobile/idi-p/2578/page/4#comments

What about tab groups

I didn't even think what the questionnaire was about, and filled the entire thing. It's a rare thing to see for a FOSS project to ask what I'm staring at this very moment, how to make it better. But yes, the questionnaire was a bit oddly structured.

@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...
  
  Why not just get one big list with like 4 answers:
  really want
  want
  meh
  don't want
  How is that worse than getting like 10 screens of relative answers?
  
  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
  
  @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!
  librewolf
- I don't know if the survey questions are loaded, but it feels like they could easily be misinterpreted.
  For example, somebody might rank the "organize toolbar buttons and AI chatbots" even if they hate AI's snake oil, and now Mozilla has a data point where they can say "Some of our respondents said they want AI as much as side tabs!"
  This seems especially sketchy when the side tab idea came directly from a vocal portion of Mozilla users, while the decision to follow the AI chatbot trend was decided by the same management that overpays their CEO every year.

- That isn't a break. They are forcing you rank them by most, least, and between.
- That's working as intended. The survey won't accept you wanting two things most or least. You can pick one you want most, one you want least, and the unselected option is the one you have the weakest opinion on.
- Of each set of 3, you can only have one marked as most wanted and one marked as least wanted. You will leave one statement blank.
- You Should reach out to them and let them know of this glitch.
- I don't think you understood the assignment friend.

When I got to the second set of most wanted/least wanted I gave up. Maybe that was the intent behind the design of the survey.
- Why?...