Ordinary Nothing

So Download.com are running a poll about switching to FireFox.
And people seem surprised about the high percentage of people claiming to have already switched.



I use FireFox myself. That’s not relevant. What’s relevant is that the poll is… well… not relevant. For pretty much the same reasons most online polls aren’t, but not just.



The result are already skewed by self selection of participants. Even assuming the crowd that goes to the site, download.com, is representative of the global Internet users population, not everyone will answer the poll.

And those that answer are not randomly distributed. Most users won’t answer the poll unless they give a damn about what it’s about.

Many FireFox users today probably do, or they wouldn’t be using it. Most IE users, on the other hand, may not really have a clue what FireFox is, or what it means to them, and so have no opinion. This means that even if the poll had a FireFox?! What’s that? option, which it doesn’t, they wouldn’t bother answering.

An interesting extra data item could be the number of page hits that didn’t access the poll. But that doesn’t mean much by itself as well, since it includes people that didn’t scroll down enough, and the like.

Not to mention repeat hits, automatic scripts, and all the nice other things that usually tend to come up when someone actually pretends to take a poll seriously



In addition to that, you have various blogs and sources sending people to take the poll, such as Spread FireFox. And in fact the large majority of them (I’d say all, but I don’t have the time for a really thorough check, and one may always crop up) are very FireFox friendly. I wager you won’t catch too many Stick with IE sites telling people they can go and vote to switch to FireFox only When heck freezes over.



Besides, they can check (well, try to. Changing the user agent string and the likes is far from impossible) what browser the users used. If someone already uses FireFox, they don’t really need to vote…

Well, if someone uses IE5 they probably don’t need to vote as well ;-)



And then of course, even if the result was both reliable and representative (instead of 0 out of 2), this specific poll is still pretty pointless. It doesn’t help anyone. It doesn’t have a clear purpose.

It’s not asking what browser people are using, apart from one answer saying FireFox, and several others saying Not FireFox.

It’s not asking what features are wanted before switching to FireFox, apart from just one answer mentioning security testing (and yes, it is an issue. Of course more problems are found more frequently on IE, but Mozilla/FireFox do have their share. Am I more worried about watching a JPEG on my browser, or about watching a BMP on it? Though call…). Other reasons aren’t mentioned, so it doesn’t help any of the developers, any of the competitors, or anyone else trying to find trends..

I just can’t seem to find a good reason for the poll at all. The survey result teaches us nothing. No, wait, scrap that, it probably teaches us that CNet are about to cut some staff, since apparently they have some poll writers on the payroll with nothing to do on their hand. Interesting idea, running a poll instead of running a press release and being done with it…



And yes, I voted. What better way to see if the silly results are really like all the comments claimed?

October 7th, 2004 at 0:25 EET | Categories: Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.