Last week we finally turned on click-to-play plugins as the default state for all plugins except Flash in Nightly builds (which will be Firefox 26). This is a milestone in giving Firefox users control over plugins and helping protect them from being exploited via unused and unwanted plugins.

As part of this feature, we have started to measure how users interact with the click-to-play UI. Nightly users aren’t typical, so this data probably doesn’t mean much yet, but it’s nice to see it in action:

PLUGINS_NOTIFICATION_PLUGIN_COUNT

This data shows how many different kinds of plugins were present in the plugin notification UI when each user saw it. When designing the notification, we wanted to streamline the common case, which we believed was that normally there would be only one kind of plugin on a page. This telemetry data will help verify our assumption. The current Nightly data shows a single type of plugin is the most common case, but not by as much as I originally thought:

# of Plugins	Notification Count
1	32994
2	5935
3	179
4	3
5 or more	0

PLUGINS_NOTIFICATION_SHOWN

This data shows what user action triggered showing the plugin notification.

User Action	Notification Count
Click on in-content plugin UI	23706
Click on location bar icon	15405

I’m surprised that so many users are clicking on the location bar icon. That may just be inquisitive users checking what each button does, but I’ll be monitoring this as it goes up the trains to the more representative beta population. If this stays very high, then we may have a problem with distracting users with unnecessary UI.

PLUGINS_NOTIFICATION_USER_ACTION

This data shows what action users are choosing to take in the plugin notification. Note that when multiple plugins are shown in the same notification, there will be a separate action for each plugin:

User Action	Notification Count
Allow Now	16705
Allow Always	9196
Block	2199

I’m a little surprised at the distribution of “Allow Now” and “Allow Always”. When designing this UI, we expected that most users would want the “Allow Always” option, and we wanted to highlight that. But again, Nightly users are atypical and may not be a good sample. I’ll be watching this data also in beta.

I’m a wary of drawing any significant conclusions from early data, but I’m happy that we appear to be collecting the correct data and with the new telemetry dashboard it’s not hard to get at simple measurements such as this. Kudos to Taras, Mark Reid, and Chris Lonnen for getting that runing and the small daily improvements that make all our lives better.