A lot of dark patterns are opt-in or "We're trying out something new, it's just a test" to start with. Until they're silently upgraded to opt-out a year or two down the line. Then the opt-out gets moved to the ass-end of a legacy settings menu under a generic name under the pretext of UI renewal. Then a couple more years later the "It's been like that for years, what's the issue?" line can be used to shut down anyone who still cares. It's best to nip this kind of thing in the bud.

It's probably just temporarily an opt-in.

That seems like pure speculation.

That seems like pure naivete. Two can play that game.

A little over a year or so ago I downloaded Firefox. It kept bugging me for updates. But I didn't want these pestering updates. Erstwhile, I could just disable updating with a single unchecking of a box. But they changed it to make it almost impossible to disable updates. I never put enough effort into figuring it out.

Firefox is getting just like Microsoft, Apple, FaceBook, GNOME, etc. "We set the policy, it's our software, you're just the user."

I switched to Debian, which managed to sort all this nonsense out, thankfully.

It is extremely dangerous to use a browser that is not fully up-to-date.

Security patches and general updates are not distinct anymore. You might aswell end up with more bugs by updating.

It should still be the user's choice.

I'm using Firefox Nightly and it lets me manually control when updates are installed.

Alternatively, on Linux you can use the distro Firefox package and control its updates that way.

The issue is that this feature exists at all. Ads and tracking are the cause of 90% of what is wrong with the current internet.

A friend had this enabled by default with no user interaction.