But there are business and competitive consequences to our approach – we don’t always know as much as we want about the fundamentals of our own business. Mozilla continues to stand behind that approach. While we compete in an industry that is driven by data, we strictly follow a set of data privacy principles that limit what we learn about our own products. Mozilla doesn’t vacuum up your data and worry about the consequences later. We want to understand aggregate behavior and potential for revenue – basically how users are searching and how often they are searching – but not what they are searching for. The new measurements will give a fuller picture of search activity while maintaining user privacy by limiting collection to aggregate counts. To address this challenge, we are deploying additional search measurements that will give us further insight into how users search with our browser. This follow-on measurement helped us understand our users and our business, but we’ve come to realize we still have major gaps.

Last year, we announced new telemetry measurements to count follow-on searches that start in Firefox and continue on search engine pages.

Mozilla firefox search is real small4