combine addon telemetry data with containers telemetry data

[bakulf]

I just realized that the use I do of Containers, do not require the use of the addon. Mainly I have 2 containers tabs, both pinned, and session restore to load gmail in those tabs. From a addon point of view, I don't use containers, but in practice, I am an active user. Probably we should introduce a ping with containers tabs opened each X minutes. How does it sound?

[groovecoder]

FWIW, if you have the add-on installed and you run Firefox, Test Pilot itself will ping that you have it installed and are actively using Firefox with it.

Periodic telemetry pings are problematic for at least a couple reasons:

1. Need to update the privacy notices of the addon
2. Periodic pings make back-end analysis harder - it's harder to measure active usage because we have to filter out the passive periodic pings from the active user-driven pings

Not impossible, but if the main concern is to make sure you're still counted as an "active user" - you should be, even with the usage pattern you describe here.

[bakulf]

As discussed on IRC, we want to send a telemetry ping when the tab is activated. @groovecoder do you want to take this issue?

[groovecoder]

I've got https://github.com/mozilla/testpilot-containers/pull/389 for #209. But one of the issues there is that the page count pings are sent on browser.tabs.onRemoved events, which do not seem to fire when Firefox quits.

We may be able to build on top of #389 for this, but it will take a bit more planning.

[groovecoder]

@bakulf - there's an idle WebExtension API such that we could start a counter idle.onStateChanged === "active" and stop and send the ping idle.onStateChanged in ["idle", "locked"]. Would that cover your usage?

[groovecoder]

@bakulf and comment here? would the idle API/event capture your usage?

[bakulf]

Yes, that would work. And maybe we can send a telemetry ping when FF starts if there are containers pinned tabs on startup.