Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

wtf Mozilla, why are you making me stop using you?

They seem to be trying to gather a lot of telemetry to measure how they can boost popularity of Firefox. I wonder did they tried to measure how the measurement itself influences popularity? Social measurements are like quantum ones, they change reality.

There was a funny story of a Hawthorn Experiment[1], which tried to find ways to boost productivity but at the end managed to state just that the very attempt to conduct an experiment boosts productivity. It seems to me that with Mozilla the effect has a opposite sign and any attempt to measure decreases the target variables of decision making. And therefore they need to find ways to measure "non-invasively", not to measure every little thing they can measure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Okay, first the stupid fucking ‘Turning Red’ advertisement that dared to call itself ‘adorable’, and now this?

Seriously, does FireFox hate itself, or just hates it’s dwindling but loyal user base?

We used to use Firefox because they didn’t do shit like this.

I actually deleted Firefox after about 15 years of loyal use after the ‘Turning Red’ incident. Glad to hear I made the right call.

I’ve been using Safari and have no regrets.

Goodbye, Firefox. Good riddance, if this is how you’ll behave.

It’s sad to watch the dream of a mainstream open-source browser that wasn’t evil vanish.

We will need something else, but I don’t see huge potential adoption for anything.

It was hard enough to get people to swap browsers in the 00’s, it’s gonna be way harder with each platform pushing its own pre-installed browser.

This is late-stage Firefox behavior. Like Yahoo in 2012.