Survey Articles

Ever wonder which industries have the most web developers? Do you know how many people develop for the web on Linux? Are there more web designers out there than web developers? Where do web developers hang out and what do they think of the resources out there today? Which JavaScript library is the most popular? How many developers use Google Code or visit the MDN for documentation?

We wanted to get answers to those questions and more… so we reached out to our community and beyond. We ended up with a snapshot of the web developers out there to better guide our plans for the Mozilla Developer Network. While we know a lot about Mozilla hackers, add-on developers, and those working on mobile, we wanted to learn more about web developers, who are by far the largest segment that we touch. And while there is data available about their demographics and the technologies they use, we couldn’t find anything that would give us a better understanding of where they hang out and what they think of the companies that are working on the products and technologies they build and use.

We looked at the breakdown of web developers, and of the websites and resources they rely on. We will use the results to improve our documentation on the MDN Doc Center and continue to better engage with web developers. As more mobile app developers adopt the web platform for apps and games we want to encourage web developers to push the limits of web applications. Our demos will showcase what the latest HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript innovations. We want to use this survey to know what Mozilla can do to help web developers support the open web.

I’ll summarize the results from the 1,331 responses we received from our “Web Developers & the Open Web 2010” (WDATOW 2010) survey, and share the infographic we created to capture some of the key findings.

The Infographic

Our Sample

We reached the greatest number of respondents via our Hacks blog and @mozhacks Twitter account, but we were also able to tap into our global community through our localizers, who helped translate the survey into 9 languages: English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Japanese, and Indonesian. We also posted requests for responses to various developer forums and websites affiliated with other companies, to ensure we had a broad sample that was as representative as possible. Of course we didn’t get as many responses from some of those channels, so the results should be interpreted with the caveat that active Mozilla community members are likely overrepresented.

However, that does not take away from the value of the information we have gathered. We identified “Mozilla” developers and “Other” developers based on answers to a few questions and found that the cross-over profiles of both categories of people were very similar. You can find out more on page 11 in the full report. We identified both categories based on the overall feedback on Mozilla sites vs other company sites, as well as how often they visited those sites, with those that primarily visited MDN making up the “Mozilla” developers, and those that did not being labeled “Other”. Therefore, while some of the open-ended questions might have a lot of subjective and fairly biased opinions, most of the questions produced fairly consistent responses from both groups when it came to the technologies and resources.

We had a very diverse set of respondents that spans the entire globe. While most other research has large US samples, with only a few other countries represented, for our survey, only 20% of the respondents were in the US. Given the high response rate from Europe, we ended up with a well-balanced international sample. That’s why some of our results may not look like web developer profiles that you have seen elsewhere. And that’s a good thing: we are providing another data point for comparison and further analysis.

Web Developer Profiles

We started the survey with some basic questions that would allow us to segment the developers taking the survey. One interesting finding that didn’t seem to match other research we had looked at was the primary OS used by developers. While we would expect most web developers to be on Mac OS X, followed by Windows and a small percentage on Linux (like in the Web Directions survey), we had a more evenly distributed breakdown. Recent Windows versions combined made up 46%, followed by a strong showing of Linux users at 30%, and Mac OS X with a 24% developer base. I would say that a strong bias towards open source in the sample combined with the fact that we had a lot of responses from outside the US are the reasons for Linux being more popular. Also, while a lot of people self-selected as both a web developer and designer, the sample definitely skews towards web developers, so perhaps that explains the Mac OS X numbers.

It was also interesting to see the years of experience spread out across veterans and newbies, with about 48% of the sample having less than 5 years of experience and 52% having 6 or more years in web development.

For our “What type of a web developer/designer are you?” question, respondents were allowed to choose more than one answer, so it’s not surprising to see that a lot of people work on many aspects of web development. However, it was clear that most of them were in one (or both) of two categories: 89% front-end developers and 75% back-end developers. There were more web architects than I expected at 41%, and designers made up a sizable chunk, at 39% of the sample. And although only 15% of those surveyed selected “Add-on developer”, we expect that number to go up as more web developers start to create Firefox extensions with Add-on Builder, using JavaScript rather than heavier-weight programming languages.

There were no surprises from the industries question, with most web developers working in technology at 38%, followed by media at 18%. And while there were smaller percentages working in other industries, 11% of those surveyed were students who have not yet entered the work force. For more on developer profiles see the full report.

Where Developers Spend Time

Perhaps the most important series of questions in this survey focused on the web resources and communities that developers rely on for their day-to-day work. Whether it was for looking up documentation or asking questions to debug their code, we wanted to get an idea of the most popular websites for web developers.

We picked a list of websites based on initial feedback from web developers during the survey design process, and the results clearly show that all of them are popular and engender a lot of opinions on aspects of those sites.

We not only asked which resource and community was the respondent’s favorite, but also provided a list of attributes for them to rate. PHP.net was the most popular resource at 32%, followed by jQuery.com and w3schools. And Stack Overflow was by far the most popular developer community at 40%, followed by GitHub and Wikipedia.

We intentionally included a diverse set of websites in order to see how developers rated them on our list of criteria. Since MDN supports both resources and communities, we wanted to get data on a broad set of sites. Be sure to take a close look at the ratings to see how all the websites did across a number of important attributes. You can find them starting on page 20 of the full report.

We were looking for a way to find out what works across a variety of site characteristics. For example, our Hacks blog is mostly posts about web technology, the MDN Doc Center is all about documentation, and our various programs and campaigns via Mobile, Add-ons, and Labs provide a more interactive forum for developers to get involved. Based on the ratings and open-ended feedback, we have learned a lot about which existing sites do well in terms of effectiveness, documentation, navigation, aesthetics, etc.

All of this information is valuable for us as we evaluate and prioritize projects that will help us grow and improve our MDN community.

Web Technologies

We also wanted to gauge which technologies developers are using right now. It was no surprise that the web standards trio of HTML, CSS and JavaScript remain the primary set of technologies for most web developers, with usage at over 95% for all three. PHP was also notably still the most popular programming language at 80%, with Python a distant second at 24%, followed by Flash at 22%. To see the complete breakdown of technologies used, as well as what developers identified as “open technologies”, see page 16 in the full report.

Within JavaScript, jQuery remains the most popular library at 82%. Prototype was used by 16% of the respondents, with Mootools next at 12%, and Yahoo’s YUI coming in at 10%. With so many JS libraries to choose from, we expect that those numbers will continue to shift.

We also asked which next-generation technologies were interesting to our respondents, and found out that HTML5 video, canvas, and SVG were all important to developers. 3D using WebGL seemed less interesting to them, but that might be due to the technology being not yet ready for prime time and the lack of examples in the wild. We hope to change that with the capabilities in Firefox 4 and beyond.

Company Affiliated Websites

Although all of the sites in this category serve different purposes and have varying feature sets, it was still important to get a feel for where developers were spending their time and how they viewed the developer sites from companies like Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Oracle, and Sun.

Given our sample, we expected most developers to have heard of and frequently visited Google’s and Mozilla’s sites. The data clearly shows both as popular destinations for web developers. But it’s important to note that these two sites offer different benefits to developers. Google Code is a great open source code repository and community, while the MDN website remains a very popular web documentation resource.

The other sites are mostly focused on promoting and supporting the company’s products and technologies, so it wasn’t surprising to see that many of our respondents had never, or rarely, visited them. Again, given our audience, we expected to see this and it was nice to confirm our assumptions.

What’s next?

Our survey report, as well as the high-level data reflected in our infographic, give us a snapshot of the web developers we serve through our MDN website and programs. With the insights from this survey, we now know where in the world our audience is, where they go for information and help, and what they think about the companies that help define the web.

A few key areas we need to work on right now are localization, documentation, and developer tools. From the knowledge we have gained, we now have data to back up some of the assumptions we have made to date, the details we need to refine our MDN roadmap, and user feedback to guide our developer engagement efforts from a marketing and communications stand point.

As we kick off the new MDN docs platform project, build out a demo gallery to showcase the latest in HTML5 and CSS3 the web has to offer, and continue to find ways to connect with the web developers that visit us every day, this survey and future developer research will continue to guide us.

Thanks to everyone who participated and we hope that you find the infographic interesting. We tried to capture the major findings in a way that would allow anyone to quickly get a sense of what the web developer community looks like today. If you’re interested in seeing the full report, it is available at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/39278543/Web-Developers-the-Open-Web-Survey-Results.

Thanks!
- Jay & the MDN team

UPDATE: I apologize for anyone that had problems viewing the full report on scribd.com. I did not realize you needed an account to view public slides. The report is now available for download in .pdf, .odp, and .pptx formats.

If you are a web developer or designer, we can use your input. After gaining some great insights from our previous survey on Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5, we have decided to go broader and get a better industry-wide snapshot of web developers.

We have created a new survey in our continued effort to better understand the web developer landscape and how the Mozilla Developer Network can be a better resource within it. Over the past few weeks, we have interviewed web developers about how they work and collaborated with a research consultant to compile a list of questions that will hopefully give us a clearer picture of the people behind the open Web and how we can better serve them.

This survey asks questions about the web development experience: the technologies and resources you use, the communities you join, and the companies that influence the realm of your work. We plan to use your responses to improve our developer engagement efforts and deliver relevant programs and content through the Mozilla Developer Network to make your web development experience better.

Your input is be much appreciated. Take the survey here, and please feel free to share the survey with other web developers and designers. Please pass on this link: http://bit.ly/wdatow2010 to the appropriate lists, forums, blogs, etc.

It is important that the results accurately represent the diverse set of people that make up the web developers of the world, so we hope that you will help us reach other developer communities, including those mentioned in our survey. Together, we can take a step closer to a better open Web. Thanks!

- the MDN team

To follow up on the developer survey from last November, we did a second survey this past March after the releases of Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5 to gauge developer reactions to the latest features in the browser and a much improved version of everyone’s favorite developer tool.

In this post we’ll share the results of our latest survey and provide some data and insights from all the great feedback we have received.  We hope this will help us better understand developers’ needs and continue to build out the Mozilla Developer Network to better engage with them.

Recap of the November 2009 Survey

As a refresher, here is a summary of the initial November 2009 survey. The main takeaways were as follows:

• Our community is made up of a diverse set of developers that cover all aspects of web development from design to back-end work.
• Open standards are by far the most popular technologies used for web development work.
• Firefox is the most common browser used first by developers for testing their work, primarily because of the many developer tools and Add-ons available for Firefox and Mozilla’s strong support for web standards.
• Firebug stood out as the most popular developer tool and many developers agreed that it is “absolutely essential for development.”

Results from the March 2010 Survey

Our second developer survey received 2,267 responses over two months from late March to early June.

For this survey there were several common questions from the previous one  – about browser preferences – so that we could measure satisfaction over time and follow trends in browser adoption following the release of Firefox 3.6.
We also responded to the overwhelmingly enthusiastic praise of Firebug by asking for feedback on the most recent release.  By obtaining more specific feedback on the latest version of Firebug, we hope to address any remaining issues to make it an even more effective and attractive tool for developers.

Developer Browser Preferences

We did not see much change in browser preferences from November 2009 to March 2010.  Even considering a new iteration of Firefox and increasing competition from other browsers, the data still reflect general browser market share trends: the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome gained at the expense of older versions of IE.

The following data show the primary browsers developers use to test their websites:

Which browser(s) do you test your web sites against to make sure they are compatible?

November 2009

Tested Against	Percent
Firefox 3.5	82.03%
IE 8	74.63%
IE 7	68.23%
Chrome	60.23%

March 2010

Tested Against	Percent
Firefox 3.6	80.17%
IE 8	70.23%
Chrome	62.37%
IE 7	56.18%

The numbers are unlikely to shift drastically because regardless of developers’ personal preferences, the top browsers listed above are the ones most commonly used by regular users, as demonstrated by browser market share data. Thus it makes sense that developers test against these browsers most often.

Firefox isn’t just the most popular browser for developing, according to the data below; it’s also popular for personal usage. It should be noted, however, that this survey was distributed primarily though Mozilla-related channels, so there might be some bias in the results; we address this problem later in the report.

Note also that the vast majority of developers were quick on the uptake switching from 3.5 to 3.6.

Have you tried Firefox 3.6?

Upgrading to Firefox 3.6

Although the vast majority of developers switched from 3.5 to 3.6, there were still some who did not. In fact, roughly 10% of the March survey respondents still used 3.5. The primary reasons for the continued usage on 3.5, however, had little to do with personal preference. Roughly half of those who still used 3.5 did not even know that 3.6 was released, while the other half responded that they didn’t have time to update.

One interesting note from the results was that a lot of developers still using Firefox 3.5 were on Linux distros that did not yet have the Firefox 3.6 package available at the time they took the survey.  Given that 23% of respondents develop on the Linux platform, that could explain why so many had not made the jump.

What operating system do you mainly use for your development environment?

Unfortunately the data lacked specific details on why developers did not know about 3.6 or why they did not find time to update to the next version.  With that said, regardless of the reasons, it is clear we should focus on facilitating the update process for future iterations of Firefox.  We will start by promoting early betas and announcing new Firefox releases on the MDN website.

Feedback on Firebug 1.5

We all know that Firebug is important to developers, so we wanted to focus on getting Firebug-related feedback for this survey. Comments about Firebug echoed those from the November survey: the consensus is that “Firebug is the single most important tool in web development.” Indeed Firebug is considered such a critical tool in the developer’s arsenal that several of you asked us to package Firebug as a built-in component of Firefox instead of just as an Add-on; some users call the duo the “triple F”: Firefox and Firebug.

While the 1.5 release was a huge improvement from previous versions, developers weren’t shy about sharing their frustrations and feature requests.  Many noted occasional stability issues, such as when Firebug is finding elements in document trees or taking certain Ajax requests. Additionally, we received several suggestions for improving the user interface, such as incorporating more Firefox-native design elements, increasing the size of the “Deactivate Firebug” button, and removing elements like the “Quick Info” and “CSS Overview” boxes.

One data point that stood out was that about 22% of developers had not tried Firebug 1.5 at the time they took the survey.  Considering that it was released in January and the survey was open from March to June, we would have expected that the adoption of such an important tool to be higher than what the data suggests.  This presents an opportunity to better communicate new releases and raise awareness among developers to make sure they are up-to-date on the latest development happening with Firebug.

Have you tried Firebug 1.5?

For those of you who are interested in learning more about documentation, features, and related news, visit the Firebug website.  Along with regular blog posts from the team, the site will host community forums for discussions with community and Firebug team members and offer ways to get involved if you want to contribute to the project.  Firebug 1.6 development is well underway and we’ll continue to see it evolve to meet web developers’ needs.

Next Steps

Thus far your feedback via our first two surveys has been invaluable as we strive to build a better open Web through the Mozilla Developer Network.  We now have a decent snapshot of the type of development you do, the technologies and tools you use, and the browsers you prefer for both work and personal use.  The insights we have gained will help us refine the MDN roadmap and guide the programs we develop over of the next year to better engage with developers and build out the MDN website to meet your needs.

Our next step is to move beyond these initial data to get a larger snapshot of the developer community. We will start by designing an informal survey to get a grasp of what developers here at Mozilla and within our immediate community have to say about the tools and resources they find the most valuable for their work.  We plan to follow that up with more research on the web developer community as a whole by distributing an industry-wide survey.

The goal for Q3 is to design a survey that can be distributed to a more diverse and unbiased global developer community.   Ultimately our goal is to have the clearest possible picture of the global web developer community and how it views the current “state of the Web”.



We are inviting developers to give us feedback through quarterly surveys so we can better understand your needs. Your feedback is crucial to help us build the best platform, tools, and content.

Last November, we asked web developers to take a 20 question survey to help build the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN). Thanks to the feedback from 5,054 developers reached via this blog, twitter, the Firefox 3.6 beta first run page, and word of mouth, we’ve drafted detailed plans for the MDN and we are now executing on them.

In this post, you will find our new survey. Please take it and keep the feedback coming.

We also want to share the results from the November survey.

New Survey: Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5

Our March survey picks up from some of the themes we heard you say in the November survey. Many of you stressed the importance of development tools and expressed how it can be difficult to understand the Firefox development process and to give input. We designed this quarter’s (much shorter) survey specifically to ask for your feedback on Firefox 3.6 and on Firebug 1.5, both released in January.

Here’s where you can take this new survey. We would also be very thankful if you could help us spread the word about it.

November 09 Survey Results

Here are some results from the November 09 survey:

• Web developers’ technology preferences
• Browser usage
• Development tools: Firefox add-ons
• Development tools: others
• Learning more about the current Firefox development work
• Firefox feature requests
• Mozilla Developer Center comments
• Providing feedback to Mozilla
• Profiles of survey respondents

Web Developers’ Technology Preferences

Browser usage

“Firefox is a developer’s best friend”: it is most likely to be the first browser used by developers because it helps them be most productive. The combination of great tools (add-ons, in particular Firebug, but also the console) and standard compliance means that it’s faster to develop on Firefox first, then tweak the code to make sure it works everywhere. The open source nature of Firefox was also frequently cited as a reason to use it.

Here is a word cloud generated from the praise for Firefox (thanks to wordle.net).

Once a project is built, developers spend a lot of time testing their work in an average of 5 browsers. At the time of this survey (Nov 09), the top browsers tested for compatibility were Firefox 3.5, IE8, IE7, Chrome, and Safari. IE6 only came in 6th place with less than 50% of developers still testing against it. With more sites dropping support for IE6 each day, we expect this number to continue to decrease over time.

At home, developers used on average 2 browsers, with the majority (80%) using Firefox, and a smaller number using Chrome (38%), or Safari (27%).

A small portion of respondents (7%) mentioned Webkit browsers as a good alternative for development because of its speed and ease of use, of its standards implementation, and of the inspector tool, with the frequent caveat that it still felt too limited for complex projects.

On the other hand, Internet Explorer (in particular IE6) was seen as slowing down web innovation and wasting developers’ time unnecessarily.

Development Tools: Firefox Add-ons

Firefox web development add-ons are cited as invaluable tools for development work. In fact, add-ons are seen by some respondents as the main reason to use Firefox. However, some blame them for slowing down Firefox. If this is happening to you, consider investigating which add-on is causing an issue, or using multiple profiles, one for development work, and one for every day browsing.

While Firefox is often referred to as a developer’s best friend, Firebug is called “a must-have tool” and “essential”. Some even go as far as saying that “developing Websites without Firefox and Firebug is unimaginable” and “Firebug has changed the way I develop with CSS and Javascript.”
Firebug plugins FirePHP, Page Speed, and FireCookie were often mentioned as great complements.

In addition to Firebug, the most frequently praised add-ons were the Web Developer Toolbar and YSlow. Other add-ons mentioned include Live HTTP Headers, HttpFox, MeasureIt, ColorZilla, and GreaseMonkey.

We’re working on improving developer tools for Firefox, for more details and to join the conversation, see Johnathan Nightingale‘s post on this topic.

Development Tools: Others

Learning more about the current Firefox development work

The Hacks blog, @mozhacks twitter account, and about:hacks newsletter should be your primary sources of information for any Mozilla work that impacts web developers. However, if you wish to follow the Firefox development work even more closely, you can take a look at the list of current Firefox projects, test the latest developer preview, or even run the nightly builds.

Firefox Feature Requests

While there was much praise for Firefox throughout the survey responses, there were also many voices asking for performance and stability improvements. These improvements are currently under way, as you can see for example with the ongoing work on Firefox startup time and stability, and on JavaScript performance.

There were also many requests to continue implementing HTML5 and CSS3 features. You can already enjoy some of the new features by trying out the latest developer preview build.

Mozilla Developer Center Comments

The Mozilla Developer Center was highly praised in the open comments. It is perceived as a key resource for web developers, especially for JavaScript, CSS, and DOM documentation. There were also quite a few requests to improve the site’s organization and search, add tutorials, and enable forums and comments, among other things. These are all being addressed in building the MDN.

Providing Feedback to Mozilla

Some of the comments in the November survey pointed out that it can be difficult to find the right place to give feedback to Mozilla and know that you’ve been heard. There are actually many ways to do so:

In addition to the surveys we post, the Hacks team reads all comments on the hacks blog and all incoming tweets for @mozhacks. This is the best way for web developers to give feedback and ask questions. We’re here to help you and to relay your concerns to the appropriate team.

Besides Hacks, here are some of the other feedback channels at Mozilla:

• Hendrix is a general feedback form
• Reporter keeps track of sites flagged through “Report broken website” in the Firefox Help menu
• Bugzilla is the place to file specific issues or requests for improvement
• Mozilla also has many developer forums you can join

Profiles of Survey Respondents

We received responses from 119 countries.

Respondents worked in a variety of environments, but the majority were freelance developers, followed by in-house teams and agencies. Most worked both as front-end and back-end web developers.

An overwhelming majority of respondents learned the skills they use for their web development work on their own: most were self-taught online, but 2/3 also learned offline through books and conferences.

Many of the respondents are currently contributing to the Mozilla project by spreading the word about Mozilla, Firefox, or open standards, by running betas and nightly builds, and by supporting Firefox users. Many thanks for your participation!

This concludes the November survey results, we look forward to your comments to this post, and to your feedback on Firefox 3.6 and Firebug 1.5 through our new survey.

Update: This poll is now closed – we’ll post some results once we’ve analyzed them – thanks for helping!

We’re running a short survey to find out what the phrase “open web” means to web developers. What does that phrase mean to you?

http://rypple.com/blizzard/web

It’s an anonymous survey and will probably take you less than a minute to respond to.

Since it’s a survey that only allows you to use about 200 characters you’ll have to be short and simple. And we don’t want to poison people by offering suggestions – we’re curious about people’s honest responses.

We’ll post a summary if we get enough results.

Thanks!