Hardware Survey 7: “Installed Packages”

Valve probing Firefox install base :: November 15th, 2007 :: Steam updates :: 24 Responses

Valve want to find out how many Steam users have Firefox installed.

The Valve Hardware survey was reset for the seventh time yesterday. This time archives of all the previous surveys have also been made available, going right the way back to March 2004!

I’ll leave any comparisons to statisticians. What drew my eye more was the “Installed Packages” result that is now tagged onto the end of Survey seven’s results. It reports that Firefox is installed on my system — why I don’t know but, having recently started browsing the Steam Community with Firefox instead of solely with Steam’s embedded IE control, can take a hopeful guess at. Pretty please…

Has anyone seen any other packages appear in their results?

Tags: Gecko, hardware survey, stats

24 Responses to this post:

Comments

November 15th, 2007 at 3:32 pm ::
ally Says:

my one says i have firefox and open office
November 15th, 2007 at 4:19 pm ::
fitzroy_doll Says:

Same here: Firefox and Open Office. Why do they want to know about Open Office?
November 15th, 2007 at 5:52 pm ::
ATimson Says:

Firefox, OpenOffice, and Windows Firewall for me. The firewall makes sense, but I’m also curious about Open Office. Maybe they’re considering offering manuals in that format?
November 15th, 2007 at 6:00 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

Windows Firewall? Compatibility research comes to mind, but it doesn’t make sense to do it with an optional submission.

You know, we might be over-analysing this. Perhaps they’re just curious? 😛
November 15th, 2007 at 6:18 pm ::
Andy Simpson Says:

Searching for “Firefox” in SteamUI.dll leads to a stuff that indicates that they’re detecting if stuff is installed and that they’re looking for:

Firefox
Open Office
Windows Firewall
Zone Alarm

Firewall does make sense, maybe they’re considering adding support for auto-detecting firewalls and adding exceptions automatically to support P2P features.

Firefox and Open Office – no idea.
November 15th, 2007 at 7:00 pm ::
Kapitein Iglo Says:

Did you guys notice that the Episode two stats are available aswell? http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php

Pretty detailed info 😀
November 15th, 2007 at 7:05 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

Nice! Shame that only half of the players finished it. I wouldn’t mind knowing who’s doing all the dying during the portal storm sequence in map 1 either. 🙂
November 15th, 2007 at 7:56 pm ::
Deckart Says:

Who didn’t jump off that edge to see if they could get down in that area? I know I did.

The Open Office thing is pretty strange though.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:15 pm ::
ToBo Says:

It makes sense to detect whether Firefox is installed so Steam knows with which application to open external links.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:21 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

That’s handled by Windows already.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:27 am ::
swarfega Says:

OOo is a strange one to list considering it has nothing to do with gaming or browsing. Would be nice to choose which browser to use for internal browsing.
November 16th, 2007 at 2:34 pm ::
Naurgul Says:

I too jumped off the edge to for the same reason Deckart did. I think they’re detecting packages to associate them with known software conflicts so that they can prioritise their fixes.
November 16th, 2007 at 8:12 pm ::
Marcus Says:

I jumped over the edge too and looked for a way down (so three times dead I guess *g* )
November 16th, 2007 at 9:42 pm ::
ToBo Says:

[OT:] Why did category Steam3 diasappear? I’m the main author of main author of the german Wikipedia article on Steam and used and used to link to that category… Please bring it back!
November 16th, 2007 at 10:57 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

It’s now a tag.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:28 pm ::
ToBo Says:

thx4info
November 19th, 2007 at 12:42 pm ::
Zeh Says:

Sure enough, it detected this for me:

Firefox
Open Office
Zone Alarm

What’s funny is that I don’t have ZoneAlarm anymore.

Anyhow, I think it’s a good idea. Too bad it’s not shown on the stats page (yet?).
November 19th, 2007 at 1:18 pm ::
Zeh Says:

PS. Yay, I can post comments! Previously the comment system would consider me a spammer and block me automatically after submitting. I’m sure what changed, but I’m glad it did. 🙂
November 19th, 2007 at 2:21 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

You should have e-mailed me, I can whitelist IPs and e-mails. 🙂
November 22nd, 2007 at 4:59 pm ::
Dwarden Says:

OpenOffice is maybe checkede becaue of documents/readmes w/e

in that case i wonder why applications related PDF/DjVu aren’t there nor MS office
November 22nd, 2007 at 5:16 pm ::
Tom Edwards Says:

Gabe mentioned in this RPS interview that they get third-party requests for new survey questions. Perhaps the various development groups for the programs got in touch?
November 25th, 2007 at 5:28 pm ::
WILDCORE Says:

Installed Packages: Firefox,OpenOffice,Windows Firewall

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