> They seem to be trying to gather a lot of telemetry to measure how they can boost popularity of Firefox.

This might sound like a crazy idea, but they could always try listening to users! Everytime I get annoyed by something in Firefox and try to find a fix for it, I find a lot of people with the same issue across HN, Reddit, the Mozilla forums, etc. There is rarely any sign that a decision maker from Mozilla cares one bit. But rather than listening to the many vocal complaints, suggestions, and other copious public feedback... they add a unique download identifier. Ok then.

I really, really hope that Mozilla gets new management before it's too late (if it's not already).

Yes. This is a very similar idea to this recent post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30702660

> Our sacred cow was excellent US-based phone support. That is quite expensive. If there were bugs in our product, users would call in, and our call center costs would increase because we'd have to have more people working. So every week in our team meeting, we would look at summaries of calls, and take on engineering work to address the most common class of problems. That let us scale up the business and still provide friendly and competent phone support, because we were reducing the problems that people called in about.

> Because we had that "sacred cow", every obscure bug that we spent months fixing not only made the product better and were intellectually stimulating to finally figure out, but had a concrete impact on how costly it was to deliver the service.

> What most companies would do here to reduce costs is simple. Don't fix DERP bugs, just charge for it. Don't fix "black screen" bugs, just hide the phone number on your website so people can't figure out to call.

I have observed this as well, and not just with Mozilla.

It is so easy to just ignore feedback because it's difficult to parse, just set up some automated telemetry and focus on nothing but that. Removing the human element here is a big optimization in the cycle of receiving feedback, and it's also critically damaging to the effectiveness of decisions made based on that feedback cycle...

I don't know how to claw back a company like Mozilla that has strayed this far. Perhaps the political culls they had are responsible for the breakdown in decision making competence. Perhaps they've just gotten too big. Either way they aren't serving the original market of firefox, and if they continue straying this way the only option is a unified effort by the community to create a true competitor, likely starting as a fork. Maybe one of the forks that exist now can launch themselves successfully into prominence with proper funding and achieve independence from the Mozilla branch.

yeah the pay of the higher ups does not seem to be tied to success of the browser or the relationship they have with their users; endlessly depressing TBH

Well they've spent a decade trying the "be more like Chrome" method. I suggest they try the "be more like Firefox from when Firefox was successful" method.

Firefox was successful when it was the alternative, better, option to the dominant Internet Explorer. Now the dominant browser is Chrom(e|ium). The two scenarios are very different.

Precisely. Firefox is never going to defeat Chrome in the "being Chrome" category. If it wants to exist as more than a tool for Google to avoid antitrust lawsuits, it can't keep playing that game. It has to differentiate. Privacy is not differentiation because it's invisible and HN commentators are 90% of the people who care about it. I want the sense of power back. I want the feeling that Firefox gave me a decade ago that my browser behaved exactly the way I wanted it to and nothing about it ticked me off because if I didn't like it I could just change it.

Nowadays using Firefox feels more like holding a political demonstration in an empty room than using the finely-tuned instrument I once had.

> Nowadays using Firefox feels more like holding a political demonstration in an empty room than using the finely-tuned instrument I once had.

I can't think of better words to describe my feeling as a Firefox holdout. It's still my default browser, and the one I use for 97% of my work. Mozilla is breaking my heart with their floundering. Like a fantasy author who keeps getting mired in side quests and can never get back to the main plot.

Stop with the goofy marketing tie ins, the hostile telemetry choices, the side products like Pocket and VPN, and just make a fucking browser that doesn't attempt to hide complexity from the user. Focus on that, do yearly fundraising like Wikipedia does, and be content.

Indeed.. For me the only reason I still really use it is because the other options are even worse. I definitely won't use Chrome. And Microsoft is pushing edge so hard it annoys me (both at work politically, and by pushing it everywhere in Windows)

Also, Firefox is the only browser I know that has end to end encrypted sync. Google and Microsoft enjoy snooping around in your bookmarks (great to determine marketing interests) too much to ever offer this. You can even self host it.

Also it still has a few power user features left over like container tabs. Though they've relegated it to a plug-in now.

Maybe uh... not like Wikipedia does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

Hah, yeah, I've seen that page before. It's not ideal. I'd still take it over their current funding strategy of "don't piss off Google."

Or maybe I should find a better example. But one thing about Wikipedia is that it appears to be much the same as it was 10 years ago and more. Wikipedia hasn't started introducing Wiki VPN, nor has it partnered with Mr. Robot to temporarily insert marketing stuff into articles.

To the extent that Wikimedia has graft and vanity projects, they're not ruining the core "product".

So... I guess yeah, just like Wikipedia, as in "Look, even with donations you can spend a crapton of money. Maybe not $500mm a year, but still enough to support development of an open source software product."

With a strategy like that how would they justify millions a year in C-level salaries?

It can't be worse for growth than their current strategy of burning the house down, which for some reason does not prevent them from justifying millions a year in C-level salaries.

I too want my power back. I want my user agent back. I especially want total inalienable power over the websites I'm browsing. The kind of power I'd have if I were to write a custom client for each website: the power to freely script, copy, save, edit, block and delete, whether the site's owner wants it or not.

> Privacy is not differentiation because it's invisible

Privacy could be a differentiation if Mozilla did not show again and again that they don't actually care about your privacy. It might not be enough, but currently they don't even have that.

Yep. Trying to aim at the mainstream they've already lost, and alienating the privacy conscious power user (their last userbase) ever more...

If only they would come to their senses..

I think the physical analogy you're thinking about is "the observer effect"[1]. And it's actually a pretty much universal problem in physics, not just quantum mechanics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)

Maybe they just kind of forgot how to make good software and now desperately try to recreate that magic using loads of metrics and social experiments leading to loads of competing interpretations and infighting.

There are nothing wrong with laying a scientific basis under your anecdotal experience, to get an ability to reproduce your successes. But it must be done by using the best possible scientific methods and by great minds, just a statistics wouldn't do it magically.

My (probably wrong) opinion, is that they hired data scientists who knows nothing about social science's research and these statisticians are trying to substitute research with data gathering and statistics. If something doesn't work, then instead of refining their research techniques they gather more data. They had hit the ceiling of this paradigm but they do not know it.

There are other options beyond data. For example you can find representatives of different categories of users and research their use of your software (or software you compete with). You need not have millions of representatives, a dozen would be enough for the most practical purposes, just pick them carefully so they will be the most diverse set of representatives. Or you can even have no real representatives, you can imagine them. It is a real technique of UX professionals, I heard of it in a talk at some conference from people who are professionally using it. If it doesn't seem rigorous enough, one could dig into Judea Pearl and to make a formal quantitative model out of it. One can even measure differences between this quantitative model and the reality, and it wouldn't necessarily lead to an annoying telemetry.

I will not be surprised if there are techniques I never heard of that can compete with a statistical data processing: I'm not an UX specialist, I just was curious about it at some point, because it lays on a boundaries of two interests of mine -- psychology research and software development. But Mozilla seem unaware of them all. They gather data instead.

The benefit of having a sea of data is that it's easier to cherry pick the data points that support exactly what you want to say :)

That seems like a very harsh interpretation. Very few people will care whether their specific download is tracked. I do honestly wonder how that adds vakuento Mozilla, but no one will not use Firefox due to this- especially as every single alternative is much worse than Firefox on such metrics.

If they really thought that 'very few people' would care about it ... why then didn't they 'the privacy browser' reveal this 'feature' when it was rolled out?

'Low-level skulduggery' is the nicest description I can muster (noone wants to hear what I really think).... Now (with telemetry 'turned off' each time before took it online) I have to wonder what else is 'protecting' me....

It’s another straw on the camels back

I have worked with enough "data scientists" and see enough telemetry to believe it is all smoke and mirrors and bullshit.

Managers, product owners enjoy making pretty looking graphs out of them and with enough creative accounting they can make any data to fit their narrative.

If a product is in trouble and they think the telemetry will help, then it is time to looking for a new job