
Firefox Hardware Report for Web Developers - nachtigall
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/12/firefox-hardware-report/
======
bad_user
The actual report is at: [https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-
report/](https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/)

It's interesting that we are entering 2017 and the most popular configuration
for users are Windows 7 (45%), 1366x768 as resolution (33%), CPUs with 2 cores
(70%) and a majority have 4 GB of RAM or less.

I have a ThinkPad Edge (the cheap version) from ~2012 with Core i5, 8 GB of
RAM and SSD. It's incredible that it's still top of the line in these stats.
PCs aren't dead, the problem for the PC industry is that old PCs are good
enough, hence people don't feel the need to upgrade. Of course mobiles are now
more attractive for the industry, because most of them have a 2 years of life
expectancy.

And it's funny that Windows 7 is still the most popular OS, even with
Microsoft's aggressive upgrade tactics.

~~~
sdeziel
> the problem for the PC industry is that old PCs are good enough, hence
> people don't feel the need to upgrade.

Throwing away a working electronic device to replace it with a new one is
really bad when you think of the ecological impact. I'm glad that some resist
to the urge of buying shiny new stuff.

~~~
at-fates-hands
This.

I've had my HP Workstation for 5 years now. I found an xw8400 workstation off
of EBAY for around $400. Oh sure the specs are a little lower than what you'd
find on the newer PC's:

\- Dual intel Xeon x5355 processors at 2.67GHz

\- 16GB of DDR2 RAM

\- Two 500GB hard drives in RAID config

\- nVidia Quadro FX 4600 768mb video card

But I can expand the RAM out to 32GB and I've already upgraded the RAID drives
to an SSD. I can also upgrade the video to 1.5gb or 2gb video card. I'm still
impressed how stable its been and how even the 768mb card handles Adobe
resources without any lags - I constantly have two or three Adobe programs
running at a time which is normally a huge resource hog.

I just fell in love with the performance and the stability of the HP
workstations. For a fraction of the cost, and its easily upgradeable so I
don't feel like I need to go drop 1K on a new laptop or PC. Also, with such an
abundance of these on the market, you can always find a really good deal on
them.

~~~
seanp2k2
Yep, and ECC RAM starts getting pretty important >8GB if you value stability.
Workstations depreciate like bricks typically, so a last-gen system can be had
for a song if many cores if what you're after. A short while back, some Xeon
engineering samples were flooding eBay and were a better deal per-core than
whatever the latest i7s were at the time. I forget the model number.

~~~
JTenerife
I'm running 32 GB Ram for 5 years without the siltiest stability issue. ECC is
probably for really, really big machines 128 GB up or overall an overrated
myth.

~~~
patates
Yeah, me too. I think if one needs the RAM for running VMs (so, not doing ZFS
or running Prod databases), paying extra for an ECC enabled architecture isn't
the greatest investment.

------
amq
> The share of 32-to-64-bit browsers showed no remarkable change during 2016.

The installer from [https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/) defaults to 32-bit, what
would you expect?

~~~
Siecje
I didn't even know there is a 64-bit Firefox installer. I remember there being
a fork that would build it for x64.

~~~
bad_user
For Linux and MacOS it's been available for a long time.

I've also used the 64-bit Firefox on my Windows for some time now, but it's
not the default download that they offer. See it here:
[https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/](https://www.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/all/)

~~~
cpeterso
In fact, 64-bit Mac will be the only version supported as of Firefox 53. This
will halve the Mac installer size. 32-bit and Universal Mac builds were
dropped in Firefox bug 1295375:
[https://bugzil.la/1295375](https://bugzil.la/1295375)

------
avian
My first thought upon seeing this is that I was not aware that Firefox sends
this kind of data to Mozilla.

Under "how is the report created" [1] it says that "Firefox automatically
collects information [...] unless users disable this collection". This seems
to be in conflict with Mozilla Telemetry FAQ [2] that says that data
collection is disabled by default for release builds.

In fact, on Firefox 50.1.0 on Debian I no longer see the "Share additional
data" setting mentioned in [3] - see screenshot in [4]. Does this mean that
Telemetry is now enabled by default and can't be disabled?

[1] [https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-
report/](https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/)

[2]
[https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_...](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_by_default_on_normal_Firefox_releases.3F)

[3] [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-telemetry-data-
mo...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-telemetry-data-mozilla-help-
improve-firefox?redirectlocale=en-US&redirectslug=how-can-i-help-submitting-
performance-data)

[4]
[https://www.tablix.org/~avian/stuff/firefox_data_choices.png](https://www.tablix.org/~avian/stuff/firefox_data_choices.png)

~~~
blauditore
The first time you start Firefox, it gives you a notification (bottom bar, I
think) among the lines of "we're collecting stats for improvement" and two
buttons "Ok" and "Disable". IIRC, it defaulted to enabled, but didn't appear
sneaky to me at all.

~~~
bhauer
Exactly. It's easy to opt out, as long as you're paying a bit of attention
when you first start up Firefox. It's easy to opt-out later if you are
comfortable navigating the preferences dialogs.

If anything, I am interested in the bias this data will have since I suspect
many advanced users instinctively opt out of data collection policies. I opt
out of anything that I can, and I would opt out of more if the options were
readily available. Since advanced users are more likely—in my estimation—to
have higher-specification hardware, I suspect the data is slightly biased
toward the low-end.

~~~
dallamaneni
I consider myself an advanced user and I enable sending Telemetry and crash
reports on Firefox explicitly. I dont do that on Chrome but I prefer doing
that on Firefox. The point I am trying to make is, although I agree that some
users may opt-out, many trust Mozilla and so would usually let it collect data
like this.

~~~
bhauer
A good point. If there were one major organization that I feel comfortable
sending telemetry data to, it may be Mozilla—the only organization that makes
respect for their user's privacy a paramount concern.

(I more or less instinctively opt out of data collection and have never
enabled it in Firefox.)

Still, the self selection bias is a curiosity.

~~~
Manishearth
Even if you don't trust Mozilla, the list of things Firefox collects as
telemetry on release is extremely limited. (You will have to trust that the
binary you downloaded is built from source though, but you can build yourself
and/or turn the pref off of you care that much).

------
lucaspiller
Steam also publish a monthly hardware report, which has quite different
results in some places:

[http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/](http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/)

~~~
8draco8
Steam users are not average PC users. Believe it or not but gamers are
actually just a small percentage of PC users. Most people don't game on their
PC, if they even game at all. I'm talking of course about non-browser games.

~~~
nhaehnle
A good example for this is that AMD actually beats NVidia in graphics market
share in the Firefox survey. Of course, Intel beats them both, which is
clearly a result of laptops and low-end form factors.

Similarly, just look at the absolute dominance of 2-core systems on the
Firefox survey!

------
chinathrow
Ouch: Win XP still slightly above 10%!

[https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/#goto-
os...](https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/#goto-os-and-
architecture)

~~~
hpaavola
Are there any other good browsers for XP than Firefox? I think no, but I'm not
sure. That would explain such high numbers.

~~~
angry-hacker
Chrome stopped the support, Edge is not even available on 7, so not much left.

~~~
at-fates-hands
>> Edge is not even available on 7

Was there any explanation on why this is? It's one of the reasons I upgraded
to 10, but wasn't very happy about it.

~~~
bad_user
If you're asking about Edge, Microsoft is in the business of selling Windows,
with Edge being one of the bones thrown to get users to upgrade, so not much
incentive there.

------
luckystarr
This seems to be the world wide data-set. A breakdown by regions (think US,
Europe, Asia, etc.) would be even more valuable to web developers.

------
r1ch
While the data isn't broken down by region, the disparity between the hardware
listed here and what most modern web developers will be using on their own
machines is astounding. It seems very easy to make web apps that will be
pretty unusable on the most common configurations.

------
b15h0p
This does not seem to contain information about HiDPI - does anyone know good
statistics about how many people use HiDPI screens (on desktop)?

~~~
joobus
Zooming (ctrl +,ctrl -) in Firefox is terrible, and with a 4k screen zooming
is a key feature. I quit using firefox because of that. Chrome's zoom actually
works.

~~~
sergiosgc
I just changed the devpixelsperpx preference in Firefox. No need to mess with
zooming anymore. FF should read the screen density automatically, but as
annoyances go, this is a minor one (just set and forget).

~~~
db48x
It actually used to do it automatically, but it got more complaints from
people who were surprised that it did so than complements from people who were
thankful that they could read things without squinting.

------
rattler
Would be very interesting to compare this to the same data for Chrome.

~~~
nachtigall
Pretty sure the Chrome team will do so internally. But I am also pretty sure
that they won't share with the rest of the world.

So kudos to mozilla for making this public.

~~~
cghendrix
Curious, why do you think this is so?

~~~
nachtigall
Same reason as why Google has buried open standards like RSS or XMPP based
GTalk.

Seriously I do not think that the stakeholders' values of Google are the same
as the ones by the Mozilla fundation (which also has a corporation but mainly
due to taxing and employing reasons).

I'd even say: The moment Firefox would not exist anymore, we there would be
not-so-user friendly changes to Chromium or Chrome in the interest of Google.
[http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-
la...](http://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/08/choose-firefox-now-or-later-you-
wont.html)

------
akerro
Am I reading this right? Linux usage is 0.20%?

~~~
loudmax
I'm wondering the same thing. Nearly every other metric I've seen puts desktop
Linux between 3% and 4%. I'd imagine that paranoid Linux users would be
undercounted because they're less likely to let Mozilla collect stats on them.
And of course, Firefox stats wouldn't include ChromeOS.

Still <1% seems awfully low. We're rare but we're not _that_ rare.

~~~
yborg
It's the percentage of users on Linux running Firefox, so a simpler
possibility is that a substantial number are running Chrome.

~~~
digi_owl
I think more and more distros ship some compile of Chromium these days, or
perhaps iceweasel/icecat (the GNU "fork" formed after the debacle with Debian
over trademarks).

------
Siecje
What other options are there for graphics besides Intel, Nvidia, and AMD?

What is the other 3%?

~~~
PascLeRasc
mobile phones in "request desktop site" mode? That's a wild guess.

~~~
krallja
They wouldn't be running Firefox for desktop.

------
kbumsik
What about the case of switchable graphics? When a laptop has intel internal
graphic and a nVidia chip, is it counted as Intel ,nvidia, or both?

~~~
hobarrera
Just the active on, probably.

------
dhogan
What set up do you have for 7 GB of RAM? Why is that more popular than 12 GB?

~~~
hobarrera
12GB must be really weird because you'd have 3x4GB modules, which means no
dual channel.

7GB = 8GB minus one used by the GPU.

~~~
xdanger
12GB = 2x2GB + 2x4GB

------
fdim
Pitty that this represents only 12% of the global market, good to know
nevertheless.

------
shmerl
No Linux in the OS list?

