Yes, users can themselves explicitly communicate feedback regarding the product or its features, and no, most of them don't do that. That's why telemetry is useful.

> it seems that most of them have never worked on an user-facing product

If you have worked on user-facing products, then I think you do understand. I think you just don't like the answer.

Here it is in a nutshell: In the general case, how do you distinguish 'telemetry' from 'surveillance'?

And the answer is you can't, because the difference between 'telemetry' and 'surveillance' lies in the intent of the consumer of that data. Technically useful information collected in good faith today can become intrusive surveillance tomorrow with a court order, or business pivot, or just a bored insider & lack controls.

Now consider the fact that the author of every stupid new piece of code out there now seems to think it is so special it deserves to be allowed to send... who knows what back to some opaque collection endpoint as the cost of executing.

The only reactions in response to this mess that don't cost a huge amount of overhead are "block everything" and "have your way with me". Guess which a technically inclined user picks.

Granularity. Telemetry data can be privacy-respecting (e.g. anonymously aggregated) while still being useful.

E.g. "143 people flew from NYC to LA this month" vs. "John Smith flew from NYC to LA at 2:00 pm on Tuesday."

You can do it with cameras and ID plate detection tools, which allows tracking where anyone is at any time.

You can also put magnetic loops into the roads, which just tells you how many drive over a certain area of the road, without any individualized tracking.

Good telemetry is like the magnetic loops. But nowadays very few implementations are that privacy respecting

We promise it's anonymized.

For starters, consent. Telemetry generally supposes that the user opts into, either directly or by accepting the terms of using a service, and is free to walk away.

I find the increasing usage of the word surveillance completely silly and ideological. If the NSA vacuums data from some underwater cable that's surveillance, when I exchange information, aware of what's being handed over in exchange for some service, that's a trade.

Who has the time to read (let alone "become aware") of the full scope of that?

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/windows-11-... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/required-wi...

I'm all for informed consent, create laws to give users transparency and control over their data. But if users have that and they still decide that exchanging info for better services is worth it, calling it surveillance is I think not appropriate.

Case in point, Vscode. I'll gladly give them telemetry access for getting a better editor.

That's nice. I find downplaying the reality of surveillance to acclimate people to even more of it very dangerous and ideological.

By never sending PII to your telemetry system. Or if you must use PII (you don't need to) then you lock it away with proper access controls.

Leaving your veiled insult aside, I think it's pretty easy to see but you don't want to listen to it. Namely: telemetry and surveillance are literally the same thing and the only difference lies in the goodwill of the steward of the data.

I believe we've been witnesses, dozens of times, here on HN, about yet another "private data leak" because some company can't be bothered to hire an intern for $2000 a month to do proper data and security hygiene of some meager 3-4 disks that don't even total 10TB.

So why should I trust companies by default to take good care of my data AND to use them for good only, when all the historical evidence points at them being unable to do either? Shouldn't I take the matter in my own hands? I answered yes and so I did. My PiHole black-holes anything such I can think of and until that gets criminalized I'll be freely admitting it anytime when asked.

I think it would be far less hostility if we as users got access to the information ourselves. E.g. I would think it would be very useful to see stats on which features I'm using in firefox, how often, which features I'm not using, how many tabs I have (compared to the average user) etc., and I would be much more happy to share that data with firefox if I can see it first.

Go to about:telemetry

There are several pages detailing all of that information, and you can also get all of that data as the JSON payload if you want to munge and display it yourself.

[0] about:about

You could probably find more with searchfox, using a better query than https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=about%3A&path...

> This is a list of “about” pages for your convenience.

> Some of them might be confusing. Some are for diagnostic purposes only.

> And some are omitted because they require query strings.

Some are omitted. Like about:blank.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/privacy/diagnostic-...

Once upon a time, Firefox probably had a normal ratio of privacy-conscious users to privacy-indifferent users.

But if the privacy-indifferent users are increasingly lost to Chrome, FF is probably left with an unusually privacy-conscious userbase.

I'd bet a graph of their privacy-focused:indifferent users over time would be U-shaped. Very high before, oh, I dunno, FF2.0 when the only reason non-nerds had it was because their nerdy friend/relative installed it for them. Lower when they were advertising all over the place and marketshare was growing ('08-'12? My memory's hazy). Higher now, as their userbase continues a years-long contraction and shifts toward being mostly nerds, again.

I'll leave it to others to argue why it's a privacy problem, but I'd like to push back on the "useful" and "feedback" arguments. It's appealing to say "X% of our users use this; we should prioritize it", but Mozilla has a charming history of saying "only Y% of users use this feature; we'll remove it", and for bonus points, "after we pushed this option into a really obscure sub-menu, nobody uses it, so now we can remove it while claiming that nobody cares". That is, telemetry isn't even useful for the thing that people claim it's good at, because it only provides raw data that gets used to justify things regardless of reality.

Telemetry would fix this, but it's not our right to collect data from other people's machines. So our best bet would be to detect the condition we expect to cause problems, notify them in advance, and allow time for feedback before implementing a change.

Is it less pretty and a worse user experience than telemetry? Absolutely. But when you realize you have no right to data collection on someone else's machine, telemetry isn't a viable option, and we would betray people's trust by doing it.

We've resorted to the "scream test". When there are features that are expensive to maintain that we suspect aren't being used (based on surveys, interviews, and usability tests) then we insert a notification when the feature is used announcing it's pending removal in some subsequent version. The notification includes contact information so if we get a higher-than-expected number of complaints then we may keep the feature.

Edit: typo.

You seem to be assuming that your users are always online and not sitting somewhere isolated, the ideal place for platforms old enough that you want to stop supporting them. Telemetry only tells you if something is there, it doesn't tell you if something isn't.

Telemetry showed that users overwhelmingly approve of shitty option B!

The point of the comment is to show that telemetry is used to conclude things that aren't true, and it absolutely is, and only says the subset of things that someone wants to hear, or that even occurs to them to ask.

It's not even really a seperate issue, because even if you think you are only concerned with say how long a certain operation takes or how frequently it fails & retries, the more important issue may be why or whether that operation was even used at all in the first place.

This aspect of telemetry is simply a fact to be aware of and stands on it's own, and does not necessarily mean to say "therefor telemetry is an invalid tool that should not exist and should never be used" It just means it's incomplete at best and very susceptible to both deception and self deception.

People don't want to be spied on. Yes, you can find positive uses for it, but you can find positive uses for many negative technologies. If anything some of the most pervasive negative technologies also have positive uses to sweeten the pill (or even give the impression that this is a sweet and not a pill you are swallowing).

[0] Session-recording spyware "telemetry" products practically are this, and are widely used. Watching their session playback, or ability to monitor live users on "your" site (but actually, on their computer) is disturbing.

In case of mozilla specifically telemetry didn't help them to not destroy firefox's UI.

Also go read the docs at https://docs.telemetry.mozilla.org/. Those will give you insights into every way they use data.

I've never seen a company that's more open about their data usage.

> …Firefox has demonstrated a strong ideological bias towards those groups that love to engage in cancel culture.

Firefox is extremely configurable. Settings being removed from the UI doesn't mean they are gone.

`about:config` has a crazy amount of toggles that allow customizing pretty much everything, including turning off all the Mozilla services (telemetriy, account sync, Pocket, VPN adds, ...). Compare that with the measly set of settings and undiscoverable CLI flags available in Chrome...

I personally feel removing settings from the standard UI is perfectly fine when almost no-one is using them, and power users can work just fine with settings.js or `about:config`.

Also if a setting is hidden behind about:config, it probably means dev will care less and less about it and eventually remove if it is becoming a hindrance

I was using it to enable TRR on Android.

Well, no surprise there. Technical people like us experiment. Mainstream users just use what they know, and what their techie friends recommend them. They're not suddenly going to use Firefox now that it's more like chrome. They'll just use the real chrome. And they don't like touching something that works.

Note that this approach didn't work for Microsoft either (and they went a lot more 'like chrome' than Mozilla!). They're having some success with Edge but it's mainly because they push it really hard to enterprise users with their O365 integration, so people are getting to know it at work and bringing it home.

> [...] If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

I don't want them to become like the proprietary browsers in this regard. Telemetry is not an all-seeing oracle, it's often used to confirm their own bias because it doesn't say why the users like something or what they'd prefer. What they should be doing is listening to users instead of blindly trusting telemetry. Google and Microsoft make the same mistake but they already have a monopoly on the browser and OS markets respectively so their mistakes are easily absorbed. It's not like their products have become a lot better since they started relying on telemetry so much.

But no, I won't allow telemetry and I block it for Microsoft and Google too in my DNS. The reason I use Firefox is because I don't want to "get with the program". If I have to change my ideology, I would be changed so much that the primary reason to use Firefox is no longer relevant.

Edge is also - aside from being a privacy disaster - a legitimately good product that does a lot of good UI innovation on top of stock Chrome.

Things like normie-friendly but powerful vertical tab implementations, turning menus into floating panels that can be turned into sidebars with a click, Collections etc. They're actually adding lots of customer-facing features that are really well designed.

That's the consequence of marketing themselves as "privacy first". Many people use Firefox because they don't want to be tracked, and therefore, any tiny bit of tracking/telemetry will be frowned upon. Google makes no such claim with Chrome, in fact, it makes it pretty clear that it tracks you.

They could focus on building that browser, instead of getting sidetracked and wasting money on other things. Also reduce the friction of contributing to their projects from the outside, streamline the process, bring it into the 21st century while keeping top-down politics and egos out of it. I wouldn't be surprised if their rivals see more outside contributions (in total) simply because they are somewhat easier to work with.

However, overall the vast majority of contributions to Mozilla's projects is likely still coming from the outside.

Mozilla is afraid it will fail with Firefox if they don't diversify. But if Firefox fails, the world doesn't need Mozilla. If that happens they should just pack up and hand the custody of surviving technologies (Rust etc.) to someone else.

for example Mozilla VPN and Firefox Relay which added a premium version with unlimited aliases and your own @*.mozmail.com subdomain.

If they can find a way to promote themselves as a leader of Internet privacy with well-integrated servoces, and from which they can get a revenue from it then at least they'll gain some independence.

I started using Relay recently and it seems useful. I'll subscribe. I hope they can get a few hundred thousand paying users there...

I know Firefox has its own builtin password manager, but it's mostly barebone.

Start by fixing low-hanging frukt (the tab-strip api, make real customizability for the UI possible again) and build momentum from there.

I'm ready to pay a bit for what is one of my most important tools, and I think we all should think about it that way.

Just don't start growth hacking me or anything sleazy and I'm also your free billboard on HN and elsewhere.

There's no particularly good reason to start your own renderer from scratch.

[1] https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/

>So Mozilla tries to move in Chrome's direction, removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI, which frustrates its existing user base (including me) while apparently also failing to eat into Chrome's market share.

You can have sensible defaults for people who value simplicity and want it to just work and have customisation accessible from the settings page for the people who want customization.

I have all telemetry and Nightly studies enabled wherever I can (unfortunately the option is unavailable in custom builds, and I use custom builds on my main OS, since I contribute code to Firefox occasionally).

> removing configuration options and "dumbing down" the UI

I never understood the whole "dumbing down" thing either. It's fundamentally the same UI as it was in Firefox 2.0 back in the day, except the menus are more well-structured (there's now a convenient hamburger rather than everything being in a crowded "application menu" bar at the top).

> I'm not sure what they could do to make Firefox a thriving, independent, sustainable browser

I think it's still all these things. But to make growth possible, they need to somehow fight against Google persistently advertising Chrome right on the fucking google dot com main page (and YouTube and so on).

Perhaps they could care for the automation niche. There are thriving communities on macOS who are deeply into automation, and virtually no one uses Firefox. The ones who do stop because Firefox’s AppleScript support is non-existent, while Chromium’s (and thus every browser based on it) is top notch, even better than Safari’s.

I’m not talking developers, either. Non-coders frequently cobble up short AppleScript snippets do to what they want. When they visit the forums asking for help and how to do what they want in Firefox, they are directed to the open bug report which is old enough to drink.

I have seen plenty of users abandon Firefox on account of that gap. I tried to convey that to Firefox developers multiple times—both in person and online—and their response was to not care.

If they're relying on volunteers then they'd need a few folks with the right set of skills and a motivation to scratch that itch. I would personally love to see better AppleScript support in Firefox, but I won't judge anyone else for not stepping up if I don't have the inclination to either.

The automation communities (plural) create tools for themselves and for others. That’s the important bit. It’s common for non-coders to resort to those communities (which can be as simple as a subreddit) to achieve a simple recurring task. If they use Firefox, they get turned away from it because it’s the only major browser lacking AppleScript support. Not only do those developers abandon Firefox, so do all their users.

> Would you estimate they'd gain hundreds of users? Thousands? Tens-of-thousands?

I estimate they wouldn’t lose as many as they do. What good is it to gain market share if you can’t stop the bleed? If Firefox can’t even be interesting to large sections of developers and power users, what chance to they have with the general populace?

I lost count to how many people asked for my tools to be ported to Firefox, and I’m a single data point with a single need. Before I stopped caring, I checked every (front page) Firefox story on HN and without exception I collected a new macOS grievance by someone different. Tellingly, I noticed that no matter how polite or constructive the criticism, it was invariably met by defensiveness of the “I don’t care for that feature, so it’s not the problem” kind. That’s in line with what I felt in my interactions with the Firefox developers I spoke to, despite ostensibly most of them using macOS.

It’s fine for Firefox developers to ignore whatever communities they want; that’s their prerogative. But they then need to accept when those same people assert they can’t use Firefox as their daily driver.

> they'd need an expectation of a stronger ROI than their other efforts

Their latest efforts are constantly criticised on HN precisely because they are gimmicks not related to the browser. I’m not a marketing expert, but I expect making a browser people want to use is better ROI than Mr Robot marketing stunts or short-lived file sharing services with no innovative features.

Noted. The underlying question stands: what is the size of this (combined) community and is it large enough to make a meaningful impact on Firefox's market share? Some software can survive by finding a loyal niche, but a browser engine is probably not one of them as it requires a certain market share threshold to be a target for web developers.

> What good is it to gain market share if you can’t stop the bleed?

When the gain exceeds the loss from the bleed. (With the caveat that not all users are equally valuable -- users who are vocal, enthusiastic, and/or do not require niche functionality can be more valuable than others.)

> I noticed that no matter how polite or constructive the criticism, it was invariably met by defensiveness of the “I don’t care for that feature, so it’s not the problem” kind.

If it's any consolation, that is not my specific issue. I would love to have better automation on macOS and it frustrates me that I have to choose between an open web and end-user automation. I hear your frustration that you cannot help people use your tools with Firefox.

I also have no idea what Mozilla's expected return on their projects like file-sharing services were. (Marketing stunts are usually done to attract advertiser dollars, not users.) They don't seem to be making the tradeoffs and allocations I would personally make. Having said that, trying to halt or reverse a death spiral means making hard choices that invariably alienate some number of users.

Personally I am impressed that Mozilla has been able to outlast Microsoft and Opera in keeping up with Apple and Google for so long. But I would not be surprised if they too are forced to switch to Blink (or WebKit) eventually.

I don’t have data to make that claim definitively. Even if it’s large enough and they catered to it now, would people come back? I don’t know.

But that’s not my larger point:

> Before I stopped caring, I checked every (front page) Firefox story on HN and without exception I collected a new macOS grievance by someone different.

An example is music producers missing the Web MIDI API. I focused on automation because that’s what I know, but my point is they have multiple communities to cater to. This conversation started with a quote about Firefox niches.

> When the gain exceeds the loss from the bleed.

I wasn’t talking in the abstract. Firefox is unable to get new users at that rate.

> I hear your frustration that you cannot help people use your tools with Firefox.

I no longer care. I let them know why Firefox doesn’t work and point them to the bug report but tell them to not get their hopes up. My tools are open-source and free, so it’s not like this feature gap impacts by bottom line. I want to add Firefox support because I want it to succeed. But they’re not making it easy for automaters to help; quite the contrary, every useful tool we build which supports every major browser except Firefox is another nail in the coffin.

> Marketing stunts are usually done to attract advertiser dollars, not users.

Their stunts actively lose them users. No users, no one to advertise to.

No we are talking about a non-profit and a for-profit at the same time, where the distinction is often not clear. But it is clear, that they included ads and "studies" by default in their browser, that did send data to whoever, without any user consent.

So no, I do not really trust them anymore. Still more than google maybe, but not enough to voluntarily send them my data. And this is a shame, because I would have liked to keep trusting them.

Telemetry includes personal information such as IP address and some people are (rightfully) concerned about it. Also we do not know for sure what is done with this data, as Firefox server side code (the one that processes the telemetry) is not open source (and even if it was it would not be a guarantee).

> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it?

There would be no problem if Firefox shipped as a zero-telemetry browser, and all telemetry was opt-in. This would remove all doubt and if you want to send Firefox data you can choose to do so.

However that is not the case. Significant amount of telemetry is enabled by default. Choosing to go for opt-out vs opt-in is what is hurting Mozilla's credibility here.

What then happens (and I am speculating here) is that this behavior triggers most power users in a negative way (for various reasons, one of them being simply using your bandwidth and resources for telemetry and noone likes having a slower browser) so they do their best to disable it. This in turn leaves Mozilla with data that does not include most of its power user base, the one that actually has most impact on Firefox market share (because as 'techies' they install the browser for their family and friends). The crippled data leads to crippled product decisions, which in turn makes power users even angrier and thus we witness the death spiral of user attrition that Firefox is currently in.

Source? I don't see any IP address in about:telemetry window.

I would much rather lose a feature I use daily than send telemetry data.

Part of the old tradeoff was that extension writers could do almost anything to make the web browser do almost anything. Nowadays, extensions are much less flexible. I think for good reason: being able to click a few buttons and get pwned isn't really a desirable feature. But the tradeoff has moved. I don't think that's really an argument against Firefox, but consider that powerusers are often very conservative, I'm not surprised that it caused some disagreement.

The only thing I know of that's similar to that is how Mozilla has Google Analytics on some pages as part of the Firefox interface, but there they have a contract restricting how the data is used: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=697436#c14

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

This is simply not so. Google pays to be the default search engine on Firefox because it is beneficial for them. Had they not, this place would be bought out by Bing or whoever else, and in the end Google will lose more.

The funny thing about this is that it's a narrative, but is it correct? Configuration options may be low, but Chrome has added things like tab groups and a reading list / bookmarks sidebar. They're in no way aiming to be as customizable as Vivaldi/presto!Opera/xulExtensions!Firefox, but even stock Chrome is actually adding useful features, while most news I've seen from Firefox have been them removing unique features I've used and loved, like being able to sync keyword searches via bookmarks.

The only significant feature I've seen them add - and it's a doozy, I admit - is Containers. But that's cold comfort when other features get removed at a steady rate.

> It seems that the market niche of tech-capable people who value privacy and customisation over a simplified UX is not capable of sustaining Firefox on its own.

This may be true, but it can really come down to quality of product: Firefox is losing ground, but Brave for example is growing, and doing it by a privacy sales pitch (with some dumbfucks who think they're going to get rich off BAT added in - it's a cut from Brave's ad revenue, ffs, and individual ad viewers aren't worth shit except en masse when the money pools up at creators' and ad agencies' wallets).

> Okay, did you enable the telemetry that lets them know you use it? Receiving and analysing user data is increasingly important to delivering a good user experience. If open-source projects can't access the same data as proprietary ones do, we can't expect them to be able to react to user demands in the same way, and so we can't expect them to be able to compete in today's market.

This is true, but making decisions purely off telemetry stats and setting up self-fulfilling prophecies of making features harder to find and then saying nobody uses them isn't exactly the way either. Telemetry is a good jumping off point, I think, but as a sole director it's shit precisely because privacy-conscious users are going to turn that shit off if they can out of habit.

> I've never quite understood why Mozilla got such a hard time from users about telemetry.

I think a lot of the Mozilla userbase is from an earlier age, before everything became cloud-based subscription services. They long for the days of locally installable software, buying new versions vs. subscribing to an app, etc. Some are the kind of obstinate FOSS purists who'd use gNewSense even if it meant they had to use their computer as a command line only device.

Think about Pocket, for example. I was one of the abovementioned people and hated its inclusion, and people still grumble about it in part due to the source code, in part just due to the old bad blood.

They'd essentially need a relaunch with a new take and attitude - look at Brave, whose pitch is pretty similar, and how people are a-ok with monetized services within the browser so long as they're opt-in. The product's newer, and so the attitude people come to it is newer. And it's growing.

Finally, there's an issue of focus: The organization increasingly feels like general activists first, custodians of a product second, which is not a vibe much of the competition gives off. Actors like Brave and Vivaldi have firm, in some sense political stances, but they're of a narrower sort of user control and privacy. I know people at both orgs who do/have shown their politics, but it doesn't show at the org/product level. The user? Does. I never, ever want to hear shit like "we need more than deplatforming" from an ostensibly privacy and user centered organization.

Firefox or the (quite lost) Mozilla Corp ? They're not the same.