191–200 of 310 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you assume it's necessary? FWIW, I'd rate quite a bit of what it does as "not necessary".
On another thread, I was told: "Firefox is feeding your data to Google. You need to disable it in the user.js file"
And those “home calls” are nothing more than calls like whether you are on the public internet, whether a new update is available and other mundane things.
Author of Mozilla telemetry here. You can accomplish this with official firefox by blacklisting incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org domain, per https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=telemetry.moz...
How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?
Based on their recent design changes (deprecation of compact mode, for example), they are either not collecting enough telemetry about the affected parts of the UI/UX, or they are ignoring what they have collected for whatever reason. Of course, there is a chance that telemetry confirms their vision, but based on the explicit feedback I've been seeing online, I doubt the rationality of their decision-making at least…
Should written feedback overrule a bigger data set?
LibreWolf is mostly a bunch of policies. If you go into the preferences pane, you should see a note: 'Your browser is being managed by your organization'. When you click the link, there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like telemetry, auto-updates etc. It also has the about:config section heavily tweaked and modified. Doing all that on stock Firefox is a lot of work which is why I prefer the developers of LibreWolf t…
> there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like […] auto-updates YIKES. Automatic updates are incredibly important for security. Disabling them by default is highly concerning. Does the browser support (manual) self-updates at all, or has that functionality been disabled entirely?
I understand the argument that my grandmother should probably enable auto-updates, because otherwise she could easily end up months behind on releases.
But I care deeply about my personal computing environment. I notice every minuscule change because I'm on my computer for hours and hours each day. Sometimes I'm in the middle of some important projects and I don't want anything to automatically update. Sometimes I'm really productive during an afternoon and I don't want to waste time and lose momentum on an update (or some bug, or UI change, as a result of that update). Sometimes I've heard about some problem coming down the pipe in the next update and I'd rather wait until there's mitigations to make that change work better with my specific setup.
Automatic updates basically assume that I have the computing proficiency of my grandmother. But I actually manage my computer in a very conscious, thoughtful way. All software should provide the ability to disable automatic updates (and update nagging) out of respect for power users. It's OK to hide it in a developer or advanced menu. Just give me the option.
That being said: automatic updates are a sensible default for the same reason. But let me opt out, and (Mozilla, are you listening?) for the love of god please don't override my preferences back to automatic updates when you decide to change the UI of preferences.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How valuable is the telemetry data to Mozilla?
I'm not an expert on Mozilla's telemetry, but my recollection is the vast majority of telemetry data is performance data (e.g., how long does it take the program startup, how long does it take to query the history database when typing in the URL bar) or features usage (and this is more on the level of "which SSL cipher suites are being used" versus "who clicks this button in the UI").
LibreWolf is mostly a bunch of policies. If you go into the preferences pane, you should see a note: 'Your browser is being managed by your organization'. When you click the link, there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like telemetry, auto-updates etc. It also has the about:config section heavily tweaked and modified. Doing all that on stock Firefox is a lot of work which is why I prefer the developers of LibreWolf t…
> there's a bunch of 'features' disabled like […] auto-updates YIKES. Automatic updates are incredibly important for security. Disabling them by default is highly concerning. Does the browser support (manual) self-updates at all, or has that functionality been disabled entirely?
It has been disabled, as per the policy. It looks something like this in the policies.json file:
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
In terms of security, it kind of sucks having to manually do this, but it's a small price to pay for a hardened stripped down Firefox with all the Mozilla crap (Pocket, Telemetry etc) stripped out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…
> regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions In general, that's true. But Firefox is an exception to this. The most important thing to a regular user, is that their websites work. But for websites to work, the developer had to test in Firefox. So, Firefox's alienation of power users has hurt its regular userbase. There's also the distinction between users vs customers. Most users pay…
Why are there not more successful forks of Firefox? While it's still my browser of choice, I think it's safe to say there are a significant number of developers who are not happy with the leadership of Mozilla. What's preventing other forks from taking off?
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns…