I am having trouble understanding the exact meaning of this and there is limited information available online about how “Daily Users” works.
Daily Active Users, does this mean users who have their computer turned off, or browser closed won’t be included in this count? Or does it count offline users to?
In the “What are daily users?” section, Firefox says “Add-ons downloaded from this site check for updates once per day. The total number of these update pings is known as Active Daily Users.” but this doesn’t provide much information or make sense to me. What updates is it talking about? It’s very confusing of how this count is determined.
If anyone could tell me how exactly this Daily Active Users count works, I appreciate it!
From my empirical experience, it works exactly how it’s written.
To describe more - each addon has unique UUID, that’s always different when the addon is installed.
Here goes my speculation (but likely true): When Firefox checks for addon updates, it sends the addon UUID request to the server, asking what’s the newest version.
Then, at the end of the day, server simply counts how many unique UUID requests came for the specific addon.
Practically, if you install addon at work and at home, and turn on the Firefox at home and at Work, your addon will have 2 users.
On the weekend, if you only use your home PC, it will have 1 user.
I can even prove it , since I’m going to office on Saturday and I have one special addon that only I use (in my country at least):
Mostly just wanted to +1 what @juraj.masiar has already shared.
(Emphasis mine in the above quotation.) The text you quoted is saying that Firefox will automatically check addons.mozilla.org to see if any of the add-ons you have installed have been updated by their respective developers. If your computer is off, Firefox is not running, or you’ve disabled updates for an add-on, then Firefox won’t perform this check.
Is there a specific time of day the users computer would need to be turned on with Firefox running otherwise they would not be included in the Daily Active Users? Or do they get counted in the daily users if they had their Firefox / computer turned on at any time of the day.
For example. If a user has their computer on for 1 minute with Firefox open at a random time in the day, but off for the rest, what are the chances of them being included in the daily users?
Also, Firefox says “Add-ons downloaded from this site check for updates once per day." is there a specific time for this check?
Any time of the day. I’m not 100% sure, but I expect that AMO uses UTC time to determine the start/end of a given day. Timezones can make this seem more complicated than it actually ends up being, though, since usage patterns average out over 24-hour cycles.
I wasn’t familiar with the update check logic before this, so I did a little digging. It seems that Firefox waits at least 86400 seconds (24 hours) between update checks. As a result, the answer depends on when when Firefox last updated.
If that 1 minute window occurred more than 24 hours after the last update check, then Firefox would check for updates shortly after startup. If the update was more recent (< 24 hours), Firefox will wait to check until 24 hours have passed to perform the check. It can only perform this check while running, so if the user exits Firefox before that timer expires the update will be delayed until the next time Firefox is started.
, since I’m going to office on Saturday and I have one special addon that only I use (in my country at least):
