It's currently showing 77% of the reports about Firefox as being 'sad', while only 23% are 'happy'. It gets even worse if Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are included, too. In that case, 86% of the reports are 'sad', and only 14% are 'happy'.
I expect disappointed users to be more likely to say something, but that's still an awfully large difference between the proportion of users who are 'happy' and those who are 'sad'. When I used Firefox for Android, I'm pretty sure it sometimes prompted me to give feedback, so it's not like only disappointed users looking to complain are being sampled.
I don't know how things work at Mozilla, but at any other software product company I've ever worked at, feedback results so out of whack would've raised a lot of eyebrows, and gotten a lot of attention. Much effort would have been put toward finding out what's wrong, and what can be done to fix it, especially if the results were consistently bad for weeks or months on end.
I think it's part of the dark side of open source software.
When your product is free, you feel no obligation to your users whatsoever. We see it time and time again. Firefox, Ubuntu, Gnome 3, KDE 4, systemd, etc. The attitude is always, "we know what's best for you, piss off."
Hell, I am guilty of it myself. When I'm working on projects for free, I do things the way I want them done. But in my defense, I'm one person working on niche projects nobody would ever depend on for anything important, and I am not looking for popularity.
But right now, the most I can do to express my dissatisfaction is to simply leave. And when we all do that, then suddenly they don't hear anyone complaining, so they think everything they are doing is great, and keep getting worse. I complain because I've enjoyed their software so much in the past, and I'm saddened by its new direction.
Microsoft really went against the grain with Windows 8. And you saw similar levels of outrage. But you know what? The Windows 10 preview has fixed most of it. The Metro start page is gone, the start menu is back, Metro things can run inside windows and multi-task properly now ... they may not be perfect, but they are definitely listening to their customer's feedback, at least.
I never knew about that page to this day. I left a 'happy' piece of feedback.
Should I have a serious issue, I'd probably look for a feedback page to report my problems, and would find it.
So I think the feedback there is seriously skewed towards "unhappy".
And this is why feedback forms are useless. They just reinforce people's intrinsic biases.
Someone thinks that the current version is good, but the feedback is bad overall? Must just be that the feedback is skewed. Someone thinks that the current version is bad but the feedback is good overall? Must just be that the feedback is skewed.
From what I can tell, Mozilla's own Firefox feedback stats support what you're saying.
https://input.mozilla.org/en-US/?product=Firefox
It's currently showing 77% of the reports about Firefox as being 'sad', while only 23% are 'happy'. It gets even worse if Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are included, too. In that case, 86% of the reports are 'sad', and only 14% are 'happy'.
I expect disappointed users to be more likely to say something, but that's still an awfully large difference between the proportion of users who are 'happy' and those who are 'sad'. When I used Firefox for Android, I'm pretty sure it sometimes prompted me to give feedback, so it's not like only disappointed users looking to complain are being sampled.
I don't know how things work at Mozilla, but at any other software product company I've ever worked at, feedback results so out of whack would've raised a lot of eyebrows, and gotten a lot of attention. Much effort would have been put toward finding out what's wrong, and what can be done to fix it, especially if the results were consistently bad for weeks or months on end.