[metrics-team] Daily users of Tor Browser

[sajolida]

Karsten Loesing:
> On 2018-03-21 17:55, sajolida wrote:
>> sajolida from Tails speaking.
>> 
>> I wanted to have a (rough) number of daily users of Tor Browser to
>> compare it to the daily users of Tails (instead of comparing it to the
>> daily users of Tor as a whole).
>>
>> I went up to "Update pings" in "Tor Browser downloads and updates":
>>
>> https://metrics.torproject.org/webstats-tb.html
>>
>> But I have a hard time interpreting this number from the description of
>> the metric:
>>
>> « Update pings and update requests are requests made by Tor Browser to
>> check whether a newer version is available or to download a newer version. »
>>
>> How often Tor Browser is pinging for updates? Once a day? Every time it
>> starts?
> 
> Fine question. We need to ask the Tor Browser team. Want to ask them
> directly?

I'll do that and get back to you.

>> I see a big drop from ~2M to ~1M around January 20 so maybe there was a
>> change in the ping policy... or a sudden drop of Tor Browser users?
> 
> Another good question. In this case there's a ticket to investigate this
> drop, but there's no answer yet. Want to ask on the ticket?
> 
> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/22346

Good! So if I understand correctly, I should rather take into account
the numbers after the drop (~1M) than before (~2M).

>> Once I understand that I'm happy to help you improve the description :)
> 
> That would be neat! We have some documentation here, even though that
> doesn't answer the questions you brought up:
> 
> https://metrics.torproject.org/stats.html#webstats
> 
> We're already working on improving our documentation. The goal is to
> explain our data well enough that others could reproduce it. This will
> take a few more months. But we're collecting good questions and ideally
> good answers to include in that documentation.

Happy to help :)