Consider accepting and supporting "sentiment reports"

[cvan]

Per my conversation with @miketaylr, allowing submission of sentiment reports – not just compatibility issues – could be an interesting use case for WebCompat.

I ask on behalf of the WebVR team, in the various (experimental) WebVR-enabled browsers¹, we're seeing, triaging, and addressing sites into several buckets: great, good, bad, awful, needs fixing, needs better user on-boarding/usage instructions, etc.

@miketaylr pointed me to a Firefox extension written by @chuckharmston that handles a specific type of sentiment report: performance metrics and sentiment reports, to be funneled to Firefox engineers. Here's its Test Pilot experiment page.

Let me know if this would be considered in or out of scope for the WebCompat browser extensions. If it's possible, it'd be nice to have "Sentiment Reports" be an option that can be toggled in the UI. Or, at the very least, it'd be perfect if there were just simple API endpoints to do XHR/fetch POSTs, and the WebCompat/web-bugs repo issues can house the submissions. If those APIs exist already, great!

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¹

• Firefox Nightly (Windows; HTC Vive, Oculus Rift)
• Chromium experimental/unstable builds with WebVR support (Windows; HTC Vive, Oculus Rift)
• Chrome stable/Beta/Canary for Google Daydream w/ Pixel
• Facebook/Oculus' "Carmel Developer Preview" browser for Samsung Gear VR
• Samsung Internet browser for Samsung Gear VR
• Microsoft Edge (Windows Holographic)
• Google Cardboard (for all other iOS/Android phones; WebVR sites work today by including a JS library that polyfills the APIs for non-WebVR-supported browsers)

[cvan]

Also see the Firefox Add-on Compatibility Reporter extension, which the Add-ons team and community use with great success (which collects feedback from opt-in volunteers) to ascertain whether an add-on works or doesn't for a given Firefox version and to be able to quickly identify and address regressions (either in the browser or extension itself).

Here's an example of an extension's Compatibility Reports page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/compatibility/reporter/%7B2fa4ed95-0317-4c6a-a74c-5f3e3912c1f9%7D

[chuckharmston]

We're still working on getting good, actionable data on Pulse, but I'm happy to help how I can.

[cvan]

@chuckharmston @miketaylr: for WebVR, I'm debating whether to create a database of sentiment good/bad reports. I think this could be useful for WebCompat. has there been any work I should know about in this area? any thoughts on where or how to maintain this? (I can deploy something to Heroku/Bluemix.)

[chuckharmston]

@cvan Feel free to fork Pulse, it gets you 80% of the way there. The catch: it's an embedded WebExtension, which will no longer work on 57+.

It collects data over telemetry, but you could pretty easily get it to use another reporting backend.

[miketaylr]

@chuckharmston @miketaylr: for WebVR, I'm debating whether to create a database of sentiment good/bad reports. I think this could be useful for WebCompat. has there been any work I should know about in this area? any thoughts on where or how to maintain this? (I can deploy something to Heroku/Bluemix.)

We just had some conversations this week around creating a Pulse 2.0 (or whatever) for sentiment reports for webcompat. We at least want to run an experiment to see if it's useful -- I'll keep you in the loop @cvan once we have something a bit more concrete.

[cvan]

awesome, thanks - excited to see what y'all discover