The roads I take...

It's been some time since I blogged lat about SeaMonkey statistics, and as the bouncer download data feed is hosed once again but we have two betas out, I was interested myself in some numbers of how we are doing.

Daniel Einspanjer from the Mozilla Metrics team was friendly and sent me some data he could gather from their systems last week (he says he'd be glad if someone from the community with webdev knowledge would come up to help making a public interface for such data - a blog post from him will come soon).

So, let's look at some graphs:


The first one depicts SeaMonkey downloads through downloads.mozilla.org in 2009 so far, excluding auto-update downloads for 2.x versions - blue areas are 1.1.x, green areas are 2.0 alpha/beta.
Of course, the stable 1.1.x ranks much higher than the 2.0 alpha/beta versions, and both naturally show spikes on release days. It's interesting that we got about the same number of 2.0 beta 2 on release day as for beta 1, esp. in the light that automated updates don't show up here, so that's new installations usually. Also, the daily level after the release spike is significantly higher for the betas than for the alphas, which is probably expect but nice to see here as well.
As a note, the 1.1.16 downloads visible in the graph sum up to about 380,000 total, 1.1.17 to about 340,000 - both are only for the main en-US downloads, no localized versions counted for 1.1.x - contrary to 2.0 betas, where localized downloads are also counted now.



The second graph shows daily users as estimated from add-on blocklist pings. As only SeaMonkey 2.x support the new add-ons system, the data can only take those into account here, we don't have this data for 1.x. Blue areas are official alpha/beta releases, turquoise areas are nightlies or self-built 1.9.1-based versions (with a -pre identifier), the green area is experimental mozilla-central-based 2.1a1pre self-built or nightly builds.
The graph shows that we have a stable pool of somewhat under 1000 nightly users, they probably hit their highest point at the end of the alpha period and decreased slightly with betas - looks like some people found the betas more usable than the nightlies after all.
We had a continuously rising user base all the year, though growth almost stagnated during summer in the late alpha 3 period - only to start a significant steady increase once the first beta hit the public. That increase still goes on today, hitting over 5600 daily users on Sep 22 and 23, the last two days in this data set, over 3800 of those users are on 2.0 beta 2.
And remember, all this is daily users on prereleases, as we don't have a stable version with support for add-on blocklists yet.



Finally, here's a look at what percentage of those daily users are on what locales, for both betas (which were the first versions shipped in multiple languages).
The huge blue chunk is US English, of course, accounting for slightly over 2/3 of our users on those versions. A comparison with Firefox numbers suggests that this would decrease as we add more locales in the future. The largest localization is German (green) with about 17% of our user base, followed by Russian (pink) with roughly 6-7%. In beta 1, Czech (yellow) had 3% - losing it for beta 2 was somewhat unfortunate for that reason, we sincerely hope it will be back for RCs and final! Polish (red) and French (light green) are used by about 2% of our users, and European Spanish by about 1%, all others have lower usage. I hope we'll add a few locales in the future that will show up with potentially high numbers. Still, this data is all for betas, but interesting nevertheless.

I hope those statistics give you a good look into what's going on with SeaMonkey in terms of downloads and users. I think we are on a good way with 2.0, and I'm surely looking forward to seeing how a final 2.0 will hit the road and those statistics!

Last night I came around to do more work on my SeaMonkey development website and now can expose a lot of additional numbers there:

Weekly bug statistics on the SeaMonkey product (i.e. of bugs that are there nowadays) are now available for all of 1998 to now (the last three weeks get automatically updated, the rest needs manual triggering from me if wanted). See the Weekly Bug Stats pages for all the data.

Also, the site is now displaying numbers to the release radar queries, so even on the front page you can see how many blocker requests or open blockers etc. there are for currently watched releases, a radar overview page displays them for all releases in the database, once again updates are only done for a subset of those releases as configured in the DB, all others need to be triggered manually.

I hope those numbers are not just interesting for myself, but I mainly did this out of my personal interest (or for my own release driving in case of the radars).

This is a random collection of thoughts going around in my head - probably all of them would warrant a full blog post, but I don't come around to doing them, so I'll put down the short summaries.

• Geolocation: Why do we have to rely on Google magically knowing where someone might be? Wouldn't it be better to have a community-driven database we all could contribute to, which could give you croudsourced location data?
  For example, I know where I am, I can give precise location of both my wifi IDs as well as a range of IPs up to the building, but Google Location Service (what Firefox uses for the internal geolocation module) just tells me I'm somewhere in Vienna. They don't have a way for me telling them my info and improving that information, but an open, community-based service could. And OpenStreetMap would even know full address data for this location. How dull that all our modern technology just tells me I'm somewhere in a multi-kilometer radius around the Vienna City Center.
• SeaMonkey Meetup: The SeaMonkey project has some amount of donations stacked up at Mozilla Foundation, and I think it would be cool to use that to finance a SeaMonkey meetup, paying for accommodation and travel of major contributors as well as the (if needed) the place to do the meetings. Would this be a good idea? Who would come, maybe even if we can't pay for him, in what city should we do this event?
• Contribution Statistics: I have thought a few times about doing a script that parses our Mercurial pushlog at least between releases, and gathers data on how many changesets and +/- codelines people have created and/or reviewed, to get a view of which people are how active in the community. The same could be done for bug triage. The result would be something like Jonathan Corbet's Linux Kernel Developer Statistics.
• SeaMonkey QA: We're really missing someone to lead and coordinate SeaMonkey QA work - Andrew Schultz is quite busy with some strange thing called "real life" nowadays and can't really do that work right now. I'm sure we'd all be quite happy if he could pass the torch and we'd support anyone who tries to do it with all help we can provide.
• Web-based Help and Support Resources: We have some weekness in SeaMonkey help and support resources on the web. While our in-product help is fine, it would be good if a Google search would turn up something helpful and if we could point people to URLs. One partial solution would be to have a script that periodically converts our inline help to usable web pages, and better solution would be to set up a copy of SUMO for SeaMonkey, with a knowledge base and possibly even a web forum - but someone needs to drive that. Any volunteers?
• SeaMonkey Marketing: Even though I'm theoretically responsible for marketing right now, I badly fail on getting anything done, starting from putting a page with a collection of logos and web buttons up, and moving on with all other possibilities of fostering community marketing. This is another area where I'd be happy to have someone come on board and drive this. I'm happy to support any efforts from a technical and project organization POV, but we probably need someone else to lead those efforts.
• Mozmill: Thunderbird is starting to automate tests on Mozmill now, Firefox QA people start using it for smoketests, could someone get it to run for SeaMonkey so we can do those things as well?
• SMILE, Weave, Jetpack: There are more things out there that probably need help: the equivalent to FUEL and STEEL, which we call SMILE, getting Weave to work for SeaMonkey, and last not least, getting Jetpack to work (which probably needs SMILE).
• Parallels: Why does it need to be so painful to run OSX in VMs? And does nobody else run a larger number of VMs, including OSX machines, on Parallels? I don't understand how we can have basic problem like not being able to run more than 8 VMs on one host and OSX VMs being unstable esp. if they have access to more then 1 CPU core and both thing not getting much traction from Parallels devs. It can't be that we are the only customer who see those problems.
• Statistics: I would love to have a lot more statistics on users, downloads, etc. for SeaMonkey and esp. SeaMonkey 2 but it seems to be hard to get the data and tooling that exists inside Mozilla systems out in a way we can use it. I guess Mozilla Corporation is not as open as it could and should be in some areas.
• openSUSE: With the inclusion of SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 3 (soon to be Beta 1, they already have Thunderbird 3.0 Beta 3), in the current openSUSE Factory, it looks very much like openSUSE 11.2 will be the first distribution to have SeaMonkey 2 in their official package repositories. Thanks to their package manager Wolfgang Rosenauer for making this possible!
• Moving: I'll finally be moving from a student dorm to my own flat in August, lots of stuff to think about there. Also, the machines building SeaMonkey 1.x nightlies and releases are about to be moved to a different location, Linux and Windows being unavailable there recently is connected to this, I had to clear up how to do this, and some missing responsiveness on the side of my provider contributed a lot to finally deciding to switch providers in that process.
• Vacation: I have already booked the flight for my vacation this year, I'll be away for three weeks in November, traveling through the US gulf region, circling from Houston via New Orleans, Pensacola, Atlanta, Nashville, Memphis, Dallas back to Houston. It will be quite a distance to travel, but it should be manageable and be a good distraction from my usual work, and lots of things to see and experience. I easily get excited when talking about this.
• Music: Sometimes I'd love to be a signer in a local Blues/Rock/Country band, but I hardly find the time to practice the guitar any bit or type the lyrics of my recently written songs into the web database I have for them. At least I come around to some Karaoke singing every week.
• Space: How come that the great things NASA does is not worth more to the public than the half cent of every US tax dollar it actually gets? How come that it isn't worth more to other countries as well? Isn't exploration of new frontiers, world-wide cooperation to do amazing things not because they are easy, but because they are hard, aren't all those things one of the main drivers of what makes humanity great? Are we losing focus in that we are only caring about our own small biotopes and internal affairs and forgetting to expand our knowledge and horizons?
• Test Coverage: It would be so nice to increase coverage of SeaMonkey code with automated tests, but it's proving even hard to require tests for new things added, as we also don't want to slow down progress - esp. when we are already behind the schedules we hoped to follow a few months ago.
• Mozilla 1.9.2 and SeaMonkey/Thunderbird: Mozilla platform maintainers decided to do a 1.9.2 branch very soon now and base Fennec 1.0 on it as well as a Firefox 3.6, not featuring lots of application changes, but some good platform improvements. Some of those changes in the platform would be good to have for SeaMonkey and Thunderbird, but we also know of some problems we'll have there due to doing our experimental builds with mozilla-central all along. Moving over to the branch now would probably delay our stable releases for a few weeks more, but we are already running behind the schedules we wanted to have, so we think it's better to stick with 1.9.1 for now and get SM 2.0 and TB 3.0 out before even thinking of what to do about 1.9.2 - we could either ignore it completely or do smaller-step 2.1 and 3.1 releases on top of it just like FF does with 3.6, but we're not sure what's best. For now, we'll watch it but not actually do anything about it.
• MailNews API refactorings: It would be really nice if we could port the JS-driven folder pane and the various refactorings done for gloda search from Thunderbird to SeaMonkey UI, as those would sync our APIs with theirs and make life easier for add-ons, next to making work with folder and thread panes easier internally as well. Once again, what we're missing is someone to do the work - we are a volunteer open source project after all, and people here tend to work on those things that are fun for them, and of course only in the little free time they have.
• Local Communities: Every face-to-face meeting i had locally with open source developers around here in Vienna was very rewarding, and I should engage much more with those communities. Also, my recent talk for IT businessmen on "project management in open source" was a very exciting and successful thing, I believe I could, with the help of a few fellow open source community people, dampen a lot of FUD that arises with people used to traditional IT business but who are still interested in how thing work "on our side" - which I hope to have proven to not actually be that much different as they often think. By the way, and I got got comments like "Oh, so the suite is still being developed? Nice, I need to try SeaMonkey then!"

You see, lots and lots of things are going around in my head all the time - this is still only an excerpt, but I thought a should get a few words on most of them out to you some time, so here's those bits. More thoughts will come in the future, I'm sure - i'm a thinker, you know

I originally created dev.seamonkey.at as a place to have a gallery of the submissions in the process of finding a new SeaMonkey logo back in 2005.

In the recent years, I started slowly adding handy links and overviews to the main page of the site, slowly transforming it to a dashboard for SeaMonkey data that can be interesting to SeaMonkey developers (mainly stuff that's interesting for myself).

This includes Bugzilla blocking/approved/wanted/fixed radar queries for our upcoming releases or a CVS tag overview (which I needed for some time to catch when Firefox releases would be tagged), but had been enhanced over time to include the most recently filed SeaMonkey bugs listed directly on the site, current download numbers directly from the bouncer tool and a list of recent hg changesets and CVS changes that affect SeaMonkey, along with links to bug lists related to those changes.

As of last night, the main page now also features some bug statistics about the SeaMonkey product in the last 2 and the current week, with numbers and links to the following queries:

• New: Newly filed bugs in that week
• Fixed: Bugs that have been switched to RESOLVED/FIXED
• Triaged: Bugs that have been switched to RESOLVED and any other resolution than FIXED

This gives a bit of an overview of what's happening, and I hope it's useful to more people than just me. I'll happily evaluate adding other queries to those statistics when suggested here - and the same is true for adding other info on that page!

I just realized that my SeaMonkey download stats page didn't count auto-update downloads for 2.x version but only those for the normal download links.

When I looked at the original data and included the auto-uploads in my lists, numbers jumped up significantly, as expected. So far, so good.

What makes me wonder though is that we had closely over 17k downloads of 2.0a1 but slightly over 22k auto-update downloads for 2.0a2 (next to nearly 15k normal downloads for that milestone). How can more people be automatically updated to the second alpha than those who downloaded the first milestone that supported this system at all?
That looks kinda strange to me, at least. The only explanation I find is that a significant number of people downloaded 2.0a1 over direct FTP but got served the auto-update via the official channels when we released 2.0a2.

In any case, once we sum up normal and auto-update downloads, 2.0a1 has more tracked downloads than 1.1a and 2.0a2 already overshot 1.1b, even though we are still in alpha stage.

And SeaMonkey 2 Alpha 3 had about 1.7k downloads per day in its first 8 days (a total of about 13.6k, 4.6k normal + 9k auto-update downloads) - not bad for an Alpha of a niche product, I think.

When I just updated my local spreadsheet with current download data collected by the "bouncer" tool at download.mozilla.org, I noticed we now have over 1000 days since SeaMonkey 1.0 was released (1016 days since January 30, 2006, actually), so it might be interesting to publish some stats.

First, note that only our main download links from the website are tracked by the tool, i.e. the Windows full installer, Mac disk image and Linux full installer for en-US builds in the case of SeaMonkey 1.x, and the Windows installer, Mac disk image and Linux tar.bz2 for all available languages for SeaMonkey 2.x builds (even though this still means en-US only for 2.0a1, later releases will include locale builds built by us in bouncer).
This means any install of any other build, esp. localized ones, is not tracked, as well as direct downloads from FTP servers or installations delivered by Linux distributors, etc.



In total, most downloads stem from the 1.1.x series, which has taken over the "most recent stable" slot from 1.0.x after about a year and has been there since, while 2.0.x only has it's first alpha out currently, so no big surprises when comparing raw data of the release series.

While the download stats page linked from the first paragraph gives you raw download numbers and even a simple bar graph, the downloads per day are a number I personally am quite interested in. In my spreadsheet, I'm calculating the number of days a release was the most recent one (at least for its release series) and averaging its download over that timespan, which gives us interesting numbers about how well releases are doing.

Overall, in the 1016 days since SeaMonkey 1.0, we averaged about 4200 SeaMonkey downloads per day, 1.0.x had 1700 dl/day (2300 for 1.0-1.0.7, i.e. before 1.1 was released), 1.1.x averages at 5000 dl/day and alphas/betas at 320 downloads per day.

The uptake from 2300 to 5000 for 1.0.x vs. 1.1.x in the timespans where those release series were/are the most current stable releases is still quite impressive and shows that the first stable post-1.0 series was/is considered a better thing to adopt than the 1.0 series itself.
The fluctuations within the release series themselves show that every release starts off significantly higher in the first days and than averages out lower over time, the shorter a release is out there, the higher its download average tends to be.

SeaMonkey 2.0a1 currently is at about 300 dl/day, which is higher than 1.1a (which had 230), but it's only been out for 38 days (1.1a had 70). Still, that's 300 people every day who try out our first alpha of the next generation, and we get very encouraging and positive feedback from that testing.
Fun fact: Looks like we had the 11,111th download of this Alpha 1 today, at 11/11 of this year - a quite large number of ones at once, actually

While I'm at it, from daily pings to AMO for the add-ons blocklist (so we can deactivate add-ons for users if identify one containing malware or causing certain app versions to crash or such) we can now get rough statistics of daily users of 2.x versions - and we constantly have about 800-1000 users every day on the *pre versions (telling from the update channels, almost 1/3 on self-built ones, the rest on nightlies), which is quite good for on-the-edge development builds of a niche product!
On October 19, when I got the last statistics update on those blocklist builds out of MoCo (I don't have direct access), we had about as many daily users on 2.0a1 as on 2.0a2pre, about 750 for each, which is a good uptake for two weeks after the release of that first alpha as well.

Overall, I think we can be satisfied with how well we were doing in our first 1000 days of having stable releases out the door, but there's still enough room for doing even better!

One of the fun things of operating a page like the German SeaMonkey (and Mozilla suite) default start page is that one gets interesting statistics on Internet usage, in my case at least from the German-speaking part of the Internet.

And sometimes this reveals quite interesting stuff:
The pictures below are snapshots of my statistics from June 16, 2008. Your quiz questions for looking at those graphs: When did the European Championship soccer game between Germany and Austria start? When was the (15min) half-time break? When did the match end?


Server's network connections


CBSM system sessions (5min granularity)


seamonkey.at sessions (15min granularity)


(Notes regarding the numbers: seamonkey.at serves the default home page of German SeaMonkey and Mozilla suite installations and is traffic-wise the major domain running on the CBSM system, which is one of two larger PHP-based web systems on the server. CBSM sessions time out from the statistics after 5min, both connections and sessions are snapshots of what was considered open by netstat or CBSM at a given time.)

When I looked at the download statistics page I realized that we just have gone over 3 million tracked SeaMonkey downloads this week!

Here's a per-release graph:



As with my last blog post on that topic, those numbers are once again only from the main three links we have, which run through download.mozilla.org (US English Win/Linux installers and Mac disk image) - other builds, including localizations are excluded, so the real number would probably be even higher (given that FF reports 50% of downloads being localized builds)...

As I reported earlier on those numbers, I think I should give you an update on SeaMonkey rates on the German project website - where the new suite accounted for over half of all hits the second month in a row now!

When I posted here last in August, SeaMonkey just had overtaken the old Mozilla suite in hits on that site dedicated mainly to suite downloads and hosting the default start page for both suite.
Now, SeaMonkey (blue line) goes strongly at over 50% while the Mozilla suite (red) has dropped under 40% in November:



Absolute hits/pages/hosts numbers have been about steady since April, slightly decreasing in summer but gaining again in fall, which means that we gain more and more SeaMonkey users, while the Mozilla suite is equally falling in market share. As 60% of the hits on that website come from people hitting the default home page, or "start page", of German SeaMonkey (and Mozilla suite), web site visits have some correlation with overall adoption of those applications.

In November 2007, we had 96% of all hits on the site coming from Gecko-based browsers (53% SeaMonkey, 39% Mozilla suite, 4% Firefox, other Gecko browser sum up to under 0.1%), a bit below 2% from IE and a bit over 1% from various bots, with about half of the other percent unknown and the other half split between Safari, Opera and consorts.

Split by versions, SeaMonkey 1.1.6 and 1.1.4 top the list with 11.5% each, followed by Mozilla 1.7.12 at 8.6%, SeaMonkey 1.1.5 at 8.3%, 1.1.1 as 6.7%. Mozilla 1.7.13 and 1.7.3 are both over 5%, the rest ranges below that mark. A sum of all SeaMonkey 1.0.x versions reveals 7.1% using the older series still, which means that about 13% of SeaMonkey are on the older versions, which is surely better than how things worked with Mozilla suite, but quite some room for improvement.
Interestingly, IE7 now ranks slightly above IE6 with 0.81% vs. 0.78% of seamonkey.at hits.

A short look on OSes tells us that still 77.8% of those hits come from WinXP, Win2000 is at 8.6%, while Vista is still only at 3.7% - which is good from our perspective, as SeaMonkey 1.x has some small glitches on that OS that will only get fixed in the SeaMonkey 2 series.
Linux at 2.3% and Mac systems at 1.7% are surely the vast underdogs in hits on our page, but probably they are a bit underrepresented due to users of those OSes usually being more advanced and more likely to switch to a non-default home page in their browser.

I hope that the numbers continue to grow as they do for SeaMonkey, so that hopefully more and more users of the old, insecure Mozilla suite switch over to the well-maintained, secure alternative we are developing.

As we just released SeaMonkey 1.1.7 on Friday and it's some time since I posted the last update on download numbers, I think it's a good point in time to look at current statistics.

I have stated this in the last such posts, but just for clarity: All statistics we have are from the main 3 links to our official release builds, i.e. those that go to download.mozilla.org, as those go through the "bouncer" tool that also keeps track of download numbers. Downloads of any other builds (.zip or tarballs, other platforms and other languages) are not counted, as well as downloads that are issued directly from FTP servers, or through other means of distribution (Linux distro packages, etc.) - so the real number of SeaMonkey downloads is in the dark to us, but the counts of the three main download links should cover a significant portion of our downloads.

The total number for all SeaMonkey downloads tracked by bouncer is now up to over 2.5 million - 2,559,247 exactly at the time I took the statistics, which was on Friday, shortly after we had announced the 1.1.7 release.
Of those downloads, 912k are from 1.0-1.0.9 versions, 44k from 1.1a/b, and 1.1-1.1.6 account for 1602k downloads, so the 1.1.x series is much more successful than 1.0.x ever was:



As you can see, 1.1.1 and 1.1.4 form peaks of ~380-390k downloads, those were also the most long-lived releases with 91 and 77 days of being the most current stable SeaMonkey out in the public, but then, 1.1.6 got its 181k downloads in only 25 days before the new SeaMonkey 1.1.7 was announced. Because of that, I think the red line, which is the rate of downloads per day of being the most-current release is quite interesting. It shows well that the download rates are growing - given that 1.1 was released between 1.0.7 and 1.0.8, there's a good increase of people downloading SeaMonkey, which makes me think we are successful in getting people to use our software more and more, and the market for the suite is not really dying out, but going stronger again.

While SeaMonkey 1.0-1.0.7 were averaging at 2.3k downloads/day, the SeaMonkey 1.1.x series has now more than doubled that to 5k/day, which I'd think is pretty good.

If you're interested in exact numbers, I have set up a download statistics page that I manually refresh from time to time with current numbers directly from bouncer.
One data point from there that is even newer than the data of the graph above: SeaMonkey 1.1.7 saw 34,350 tracked downloads in the roughly three days since it was released.