Firefox Heat Map: One Third of the Elements are Dead

By | August 5, 2010 | 8 Comments

Firefox Heat Map: Half of the Buttons are Dead

Mozilla Labs has released a Firefox heat map which provides a great insight, revealing more information about daily browser functions usage.

Obviously, the most popular elements are: location bar, back and reload buttons, scroll vertical bar as well as search bar.

10 most popular:
95.6% – Location Bar
93.1% – Back
89.0% – Scroll Vertical Bar
73.2% – Reload
67.9% – Search Bar
58.4% – Bookmarks Bar Item
54.1% – Forward
42.8% – Scroll Horizontal Bar
39.2% – Stop
37.6% – Home

10 least popular:
1.5% – History Button
1.4% – Site Identity (EV)
0.9% – Scroll Horizontal Right
0.8% – Print Button
0.4% – New Window Button
0.4% – Fullscreen Button
0.1% – Copy Button
0.1% – Unified Back Fwd
0.1% – Paste Button
0.0% – Cut Button

Want more details? Visit the official heat map page.

[digg-reddit-me]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • Anomaly

    Strange that the scroll functions rank so high. Doesn’t anybody use a mouse with a scroll wheel?  I do and never touch the scroll buttons on the scroll bar. Same for the forward and back buttons, I use mouse buttons for that. I  also use mouse gestures for home and reload and many other functions. Between the mouse buttons and mouse gestures I almost never touch the UI of any browser. Can’t imagine using a browser any other way.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      Indeed, I personally use address bar only.

      New tab/back/forward/close tab – mouse

      Zoom – CTRL + mouse wheel

      F5 for reload, etc.

    • Toenailsin

      i use the scrollbar because it allows you to have much greater precision about where you are on the page

      • http://WOFall.myopenid.com/ WOFall

        Opera has an option that lets you drag the page around like a pdf document. I have this enabled by default.
        opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan
        You’ll have to disable it to select text, so you’ll probably want to set up a shortcut to disable it.

        • ay

          You could press ctrl+alt and then drag the page. Then you do not have to worry about a button to enable/disable selection/dragging.

    • Ichann

      I only use the scroll bar if I need to focus on a precise section if the program decides it wants to scroll a little too much for me.

      For tabs I generally use gestures (sometimes the button) but hardly the ctrl +t shortcut.
      Back and forward are primarily buttons (gestures are a sometimes thing here)
      closing a tab are split 72 to 25% for gestures and buttons.
      since the new zoom bar in Opera I actually prefer that over ctrl mouse wheel
      Reload is always and has been the button

  • alpesh hindocha

    Don’t know if i missed something!
    But what about “New Tab Bar” & “Close Tab” Button?
    Does this map count that or no body uses mouse for these functions?

  • ay

    For an almost power user on Opera:95.6% – Location Bar (You could tun off the location bar and – F2/Shift+F2 to enter address/nickname, Ctrl+F8 to view URL )
    93.1% – Back Mouse Gesture
    89.0% – Scroll Vertical Bar Scroll button on mouse
    73.2% – Reload Mouse Gesture
    67.9% – Search Bar Use Address bar
    58.4% – Bookmarks Bar Item (I don’t really use bookmarks any longer! Speedial)
    54.1% – Forward Mouse Gesture
    42.8% – Scroll Horizontal Bar (I dont really see a lot of pages that need Horizontal scroll)
    39.2% – Stop Mouse Gesture
    37.6% – Home (on a blank page – double click , but speeddial is my homepage Ctrl+T)

«
»