I think the core disagreement here is not ideological per se, but on premises. I agree with the motivation of not collecting any data.

That said, I don't feel that we have a choice but to compromise. If we don't build a better browser, then the other browsers will win by default, which means you lose all those privacy and security motivations anyway.

This is not some gleeful romp down the yellow brick road of data collection. It's a hard-searched, difficult compromise to a question that there are no good answers to, and LOTS of disagreement about.

What are we attempting to "win". Again I go back to my statement of compromising princibles in the name of market share

I have used FF since Ver 1.0 for a few reasons the top ones being it is Open Source, it has always been the most privacy and security focused browser, and were strong advocates of Open Standards that where inter-operable on ALL platforms with out vendor lock in

FF is still open source.... the rest that seems to be in flux now.

> What are we attempting to "win". Again I go back to my statement of compromising princibles in the name of market share

I don't see it as an either-or, but rather a balance to strike. A perfectly private browser with no marketshare doesn't help users. A completely compromised browser with 100% marketshare doesn't help users either.

It would not be no marketshare. It would be the market share you have today people that respect the princibles FF once stood for

Mozilla is not happy with us current users though, they would much rather trade us for Edge and Chrome Users..

Mozilla has made it clear it does not value the Users that desire Privacy, Customization, and Power in the hands of the user. Mozilla has Dreams of "beating chrome" a pursuit I have no interest in and place no value in.

But the marketshare "today" is tanking. It's at 10% and falling. There's no reason it won't get so small that it can't support development any longer.

Then it might be more appropriate to say "has attempted to trade us for Edge and Chrome Users." I think it's inevitable that if they continue on the path they've been on since they started losing marketshare they will disappear, and sadly with so many years of audience-alienating development behind them that no one will pick it up.

The only hope is that one of the forks of earlier versions manages to get enough developers and an institution behind it that they can bring it back to popularity, but before that happens we might be calling the internet "Chromenet" and google won't allow you to visit their sites unless they have been signed with a valid Chrome developer key.

Nah, we'll just switch. If you are trying to become Chrome, we'll just use Chrome. (Firefox+data collection < Chrome not logged in).

Edit: I've been with you guys since the beginning, but the line is drawn here.

Why is the choice between opt-in vs opt-out of automatic behavior?

If Mozilla wants perf data, collect it and then prompt the user "crash reporting" style.

I would totally opt-in to prompts. Give it a threshold and ask, "This page seems to frequently perform less well on your computer, would you like to send us a report?"

Random sampling, basically. The value of random sampling is hard to overstate - it gives you a real picture of what's going on. A non-random sampling gives you a picture, but you have no way of confirming that the picture is a reflection of reality.

Random sampling and privacy run into conflicts not just in the browser space, but everywhere else. For example, recently the Canadian government went through a period where it allowed census respondents to optionally answer some questions that were previously mandatory (using privacy arguments). The result was several years of poor census information. The recent government reinstated the mandatory census questions.

The browser is just one arena where this everpresent conflict between knowledge and privacy plays out.

I've used Netscape then switched to Firefox when Netscape became way too bloated, then enjoyed years and years of Firefox getting better, supporting new JS and HTML5 features all WITHOUT telemetry and with the Crash Reporting window where I can see the data that is being submitted and submit it if I want to submit it.

What have changed so much in last 5 years or so that now you have to get all this data? What is wrong with just building a standarts compliant browser that runs JS fast and has easy to understand settings (where I don't have to go to about:config to disable the WebRTC/telemetry/Pocket etc) ?

> What have changed so much in last 5 years or so that now you have to get all this data?

To be honest, a lot. Once again, this is my personal take on the matter, not Mozilla's view.

First off, browsers were a LOT simpler back then. The sophistication and complexity in a browser has grown significantly in the last decade or so.

Secondly, browsers have matured. Remember that this software category has only been around for 20 years or so. Compared to the code quality in browsers today, browsers of 10 years ago were crude and simple. As a software category matures, the low-hanging fruit dry up, so it's harder and harder to improve your product.

Lastly, competition. Firefox has the luxury of being released when the biggest competitor (Microsoft) wasn't putting real effort into its browser product. Google will not make that same mistake with Chrome.

Basically, the information we needed back then was less, because the problems were much more obvious, because the whole industry was still pretty young. Now browsers are much more mature, the ecosystem is much more complex, has a much wider user base, and the problems are becoming harder and harder to pin down.

I think it's good to annotate this with your other comment as to why Firefox has to join this competition, rather than just do it's think and disregard its marketshare:

> A perfectly private browser with no marketshare doesn't help users. A completely compromised browser with 100% marketshare doesn't help users either.

That make sense for top sites and Flash.

But for things like perf and regression? Really?

You might miss out on issues if users don't submit, but each submission is an indication of problem (because it's Firefox that decides a problem is bad enough). And you can still prioritize based on how common that problem is.

Under the "collect and prompt" scheme, you are still sampling randomly.

A random sample of users experiences perf issues, a random sample of users opts-in to the collection, you get a random-sample of data. (If you suggest they opt-in to continued collection, you might even get a continuous stream of samples from the same user.)

Yes, that data won't cover the people who don't have issues, but do you need to optimize for them? It also won't cover people who have issues but still don't opt-in, but do you think that is somehow correlated to the severity of the issue? Otherwise the data will be mostly unbiased. The variance will be higher than if you made it opt-out, but if you are doing sound statistics, you will have to handle that anyway.

The thing is, I think, that the users that opt-in to the collection aren't "a random sample", but rather "a sample of users biased towards certain profiles".

And how did they find that out?

In part, AFAIA (but I've only limited statistical training) this is a well known feature of voluntary datasets. But IIRC they've also done user studies and compared those.

If you become everything people dislike about the other browser, nobody is going to care what happens to you.

Here's what's going to happen.

You people are going ahead with this idiotic plan - because that is what Mozilla does, asks for feedback and then proceeds to ignore feedback - and you will lose another 2% market share.

The reason is painfully obvious: You betrayed one of the core principles of Firefox, which is privacy. You pissed off a lot of people which will NEVER come back because you stabbed them in the face and spat in the wound.

You also gave Microsoft and Google a freebie. Now they have something else to throw back at you: your supposed "more private" Firefox phones home with your users' browsing history (not strictly true, but people don't dig that deep into the minutiae).

Hows that stopping them from winning by default? You basically just disqualified yourself...

Make this thing optional, otherwise you are dead meat. If you can't "win" without betraying your principles, it's time to either throw down the towel and give up or just be upfront and admit that you are going to go all in, users be damned.

That last option would actually probably gain you a few users.

Edit: spelling...

I guess this is offtopic, but what do browser extensions have to do with openness, security, or privacy?

It is a factor in openness, the Browser Extension API as being developed by FF, MS, and W3c is very very limiting far more limiting than the old XUL based model

It can be a factor in security both positive and negative as XUL was very powerful and could be abused, but it also was used by some projects to enhance the security of FF or provide other security related functionality that is now no longer possible unless FF allows or builds it into the browser directly. Same for Privacy.

It's limiting at the moment because it's not finished yet. And Firefox in particular has far outpaced any third-party or industry-wide standards in adding new APIs. They've been proactive and responsive in getting feedback from addon developers while designing the APIs. I would say security addons are one of the top priorities. For example here's a blog post by the NoScript developer: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2017/08/01/noscripts-migrati... "I feel that Mozilla has the most flexible and dynamically growing browser extensions platform"

I will openly admit that I am skeptical of any initiative that has the Backing of the W3C, Microsoft or Google. All of which have proven they are more than willing to sacrifice user privacy and security

So since Web Extensions / Browser Extensions was started by all 3 of those entities with FF adopting them I am very very cautious of them

In Google Analytics issue last month, "legacy" uBlock could block the connection while webextension version couldn't. It can't because it is not allowed to (openness), as a result your privacy is compromised.