News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Technical Details on the Recent Firefox Add-On Outage. Parent comment

Re:Technical Details on the Recent Firefox Add-On Outage by swebs on Friday May 10, 2019 @05:32AM (#19876309)
I chose to run apt-get to install packages. I have never opted-in to, nor even known about, how Firefox was running "studies" on me before this event. It's like finding out the TV you bought last year has a hidden camera and it's been recording you the whole time.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Technical Details on the Recent Firefox Add-On Outage by sjwright on Friday May 10, 2019 @10:08AM (#19877833)
It's not really fair to call it "studies" in quotations. It's better described as software micro-updates which can be progressively deployed in case the change has a regression. They do little more than enable/disable features already shipped in the binary you're running.

In my own browser, if I go to about:studies, I have two Studies running. One is the hotfix for the add-on signing issue. The other is:

  prefflip-push-performance-1491171 • Active
  This study sets dom.push.alwaysConnect to false.
If you equate that to a camera hidden in your TV, you might want to consider giving up whatever drugs you're on.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Technical Details on the Recent Firefox Add-On Outage by sciurus on Friday May 10, 2019 @06:56PM (#19883057)
In case you're curious, that other one is part of https://blog.mozilla.org/services/2018/10/03/upcoming-push-s...

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

[ Parent | on HN ]