Engagement metrics

This section was originally included in the Project Smoot existing metrics report (Mozilla internal link).

A handful of metrics have been adopted as engagement metrics, either as censuses of the population or to describe user activity within a session. This chapter aims to describe what those metrics are and how they’re defined.

Engagement metrics

active_ticks

The active_ticks probe is specified to increment once in every 5-second window that a user performs an action that could interact with content or chrome, including mousing over the window while it lacks focus. One additional tick is recorded after the activity stops.

Main pings provide two measurements of active_ticks: a simpleMeasurement and a scalar.

The simpleMeasurement was implemented in Firefox 37 before the launch of unified telemetry, and had previously been implemented for FHR.

The simpleMeasurement was discovered to be resetting incorrectly, which was fixed in Firefox 62.

The scalar (which was not affected by the same bug) was implemented in Firefox 56. The scalar is aggregated into main_summary, but should always be identical to the simpleMeasurement.

subsession_length

subsession_length is the wall-clock duration of a subsession. subsession_length includes time that the computer was asleep for Windows, but not for OS X or Linux; there is a long-outstanding bug to include sleep time on all platforms.

There is another bug to count only time that the computer is not in sleep.

subsession_length was first implemented with the advent of subsessions, which came with unified telemetry.

total_uri_count

total_uri_count was implemented for Firefox 50.

total_uri_count is intended to capture the number of distinct navigation events a user performs. It includes changes to the URI fragment (i.e. anchor navigation) on the page. It excludes XmlHttpRequest fetches and iframes.

It works by attaching an instance of URICountListener as a TabsProgressListener which responds to onLocationChange events.

Some filters are applied to onLocationChange events:

  • Error pages are excluded.
  • Only top-level pageloads (where webProgress.isTopLevel, documented inline, is true) are counted – i.e, not navigations within a frame.
  • Tab restore events are excluded.
  • URIs visited in private browsing mode are excluded unless browser.engagement.total_uri_count.pbm is true. (The pref has been flipped on for small populations in a couple of short studies, but, for now remains false by default.)

unfiltered_uri_count

The unfiltered count, implemented for Firefox 51, differs only in that it includes URIs using protocol specs other than HTTP and HTTPS. It excludes some (but not all) about: pages – the set of “initial pages” defined in browser.js are excluded, but e.g. about:config and about:telemetry are included.

No applications of unfiltered_uri_count have been identified.