<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Sorry it's taken me a month to reply to
this post. I don't always have time to dedicate to statistics work
and these sorts of lengthy discussions. It took me roughly 2.5
hours to dig through numbers and server logs and write this email.<br>
<br>
On 10/3/2019 12:35 PM, Eyal Rozenberg wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9c0ae02d-0ae8-d281-3351-60d74324aa25@technion.ac.il">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Andrei, with due respect, I'd like to partially disagree with what you
wrote, particularly (but not only) regarding statistics.
Before doing so, however, I want to ask the list of some clarification
regarding the methodology with which we gather usage statistics: Under
what circumstances; which users have stats collected; what happens to
people whose older versions don't know about ATN; etc. If someone could
write a few paragraphs about this (or send a link) I'd be grateful.</pre>
</blockquote>
All versions of Thunderbird ping ATN, because requests to the old
AMO domains are redirected to us. We even get pings from a few
stragglers on versions in the single digits.<br>
<br>
You can find global Thunderbird statistics on stats.thunderbird.net
- in particular, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://stats.thunderbird.net/#version">the percentage of
users on each version</a>. There are roughly 1.5% of users on
versions 38 and below. 2.5% on 45.*, and 3.5% on 52.*. Plus maybe
0.5% on random older betas, mostly 56 because of a weird auto update
rule. In total, 8% on "old versions"(prior to 60). While quite low
overall, It's higher than we would like, but a bit lower(~6.5%) on
weekends, probably due to users stuck on employer-installed
versions.
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9c0ae02d-0ae8-d281-3351-60d74324aa25@technion.ac.il">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">1. Quoting an annual 1-2% userbase growth rate does not say much about
what happened over the past few months, when a lot of extension support
was lost. Do you have stats for that?</pre>
</blockquote>
Nothing has happened over the last few months, <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="https://stats.thunderbird.net/">as
you can see</a>. Extension support is not significant to most
users. Seasonal variations like summer European vacations,
Christmas, and Easter have more effect on Thunderbird user numbers
than any change to extension support ever could. Users did not
significantly change during last's year's TB60 addonpocalypse
either, so I wouldn't expect any huge difference when 68 auto
updates go out.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9c0ae02d-0ae8-d281-3351-60d74324aa25@technion.ac.il">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">What that means is that treating relatively-low-usage extensions as
non-representative is myopic; and not significantly catering to
extensibility blocks most of the potential of user base increase.</pre>
</blockquote>
Sure, I agree with you. The context here is not "should we support
extensions or not?" it's - how much work do we put into supporting
them. We already put in a lot of work, arguably more than the return
on investment. Add-on developers aren't poorly supported. Add-ons
occupy a massive amount of work and discussion time from Thunderbird
employees. If I had to make a wild guesstimate based on my time,
Geoff's time, Magnus' time, etc, I would say that add-ons consume
somewhere around 30% of our overall developer time. Magnus could
probably give you a better estimate. I know I spend roughly 50% of
my time working on add-on related issues and support. Regardless of
the specific number, it is quite a bit.<br>
<br>
You interpret the substantial support that add-on developers receive
as insufficient, not realizing that it's almost more than we can
afford already. <br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9c0ae02d-0ae8-d281-3351-60d74324aa25@technion.ac.il">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
3. 1-2% annual user base growth is more of a stagnation than growth a
slight waning of the user base; the population in countries in which TB
is popular is growing at a higher rate than that, I would guess. I'm not
saying that's a bad thing considering the objective circumstances,</pre>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9c0ae02d-0ae8-d281-3351-60d74324aa25@technion.ac.il">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">4. There is a huge difference between the part of the user base who use
Thunderbird because they made a decision to do so, and people who have
had Thunderbird pre-installed on their machine for some reason (e.g.
because they're in some organization with wise IT people). Making claims
regarding whether people tend to use or not use extensions, whether we
have growth or decline etc. should really be treating those two
categories of users separately - even if we can't place users in these
categories explicitly.</pre>
</blockquote>
True, but irrelevant. Add-ons have never, and will never drive user
growth. They may help in small ways with user retention.<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:9c0ae02d-0ae8-d281-3351-60d74324aa25@technion.ac.il">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">6. "the 5-10% of users who even install and use add-ons that aren't
Lightning." - that's a bold statement, that seems to contradict even
Christopher's partial numbers. Show your stats on this please.
Eyal
</pre>
</blockquote>
In what way does it contradict them? Keep in mind that user counts
for each add-on count the same users many times, because you are
counted repeatedly for each add-on you have installed.<br>
<br>
Even assuming the overall average is 2 add-ons per user, if you sum
the add-ons that aren't Lightning you get 3.2M daily users, divided
by 2 for multiple counts, which would be ~16%.<br>
<br>
However, users are heavily concentrated in the top 10-20 add-ons,
many of which either should be redundant with core, or part of core
in some way(ImportExportTools, Provider, Manually Sort Folders) or
are already on their way to core(Enigmail). If you sum outside of
the top 10, there's 1.78M add-on users, again divided by 2 to
account for multiple users, and you're already below 10%. Provider
and ImportExportTools together account for 23% of all add-on users
by themselves.<br>
<br>
I do suspect that this guess overstates the number of individual
users, because I think the average is higher than 2. Calculating
statistics on number of users that have an add-on installed is
possible, but it requires setting up some new logging and
querying/compiling of those statistics. I have added it to my list
of tasks, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://github.com/thundernest/stats/issues/3">you can track
when this work is completed in this issue on GitHub</a>.<br>
</body>
</html>