This is great news, thank you, I was just thinking how much I'd like some affiliate links in my browser. Also many thanks for all the telemetry improvements listed in the changelog, those are also something I've been looking forward to for a long time. If this doesn't solve Firefox's abysmal market share, I don't know what will!
The important thing is that this allows them to avoid making a paid version of Firefox available to those that want to support it, or even taking donations that go to Firefox development. Because...I'm sure they have reasons.
> Also many thanks for all the telemetry improvements listed in the changelog, those are also something I've been looking forward to for a long time. If this doesn't solve Firefox's abysmal market share, I don't know what will!
Telemetry is how they figure out popular or blocked addons, failing pages, browser crashes, etc. Part of a managing popular software is indeed getting information like that. Because general public isn't keen on filling out forms by hand.
People on HN don't object to telemetry because they don't know what it might be used for. It's patronizing and useless to just respond with a naive psuedo-explanation.
+1, very patronizing and misleading. I dare say harmful, not useless. Plants seeds for the same tired arguments. Again. Helpful, not required.
edit: My 'argument' against it: when is enough? At what point does it become bike-shedding? Tricky to answer; isn't one. Transparency is paramount.
I'm for Telemetry, generally, but enjoy the universal ability to opt out. Either through your mechanisms or mine. At a point it becomes a matter of trust and need. More feedback loops, if you will.
Trust isn't necessarily regarding privacy, either. What about simple efficacy? For all of the Telemetry today, I don't see substantially more-effective software than what we had in the 1980s. More profit, sure - but not necessarily effective or reliable. It's possible - and reasonable - one may not trust Telemetry is going to good (read: effective) use.
The requirements/standards between a mobile game powered by endorphins and say, a web browser, are considerably different. Sorry, they were patronizing first.
No one on HN has any objection to explicit opt-in usage statistics. Telemetry is not the problem. Lack of consent is the problem. Software developers sliding themselves into end users' local machines without invitation is the problem—devs who feel entitled to take things, simply because they have the technical access to take them. And devs who don't even understand the difference.
I don't understand your comment? To clarify my own: it's my observation that I've never seen anyone on HN utter a word against opt-in telemetry models, like the one Debian uses.
Of all the diverse viewpoints, FOSS extremists and privacy fundamentalists, the core facet of "you can submit statistics to our popularity survey if you want" is not something I've ever seen anyone object to. The objections are always to some other facet of telemetry.
First, fingerprinting & correlation is real, and it's easier than ever because of the identifiers tools collect, and correlating is cheap because we have tons of GPUs for cheap now.
On the other hand, I personally don't like a pair of eyes looking over my shoulder, physical or digital.
People don't understand or don't want to understand that digital telemetry is not different from somebody looking over your shoulder, taking notes, and making "Mhm..." sounds.
When done without consent, both are equally invading personal space, and I don't want my personal space to be invaded like that, as a person on HN, who understands what telemetry is.
Part social contract, part the knowledge of what I can do with that data.
You know, somebody coming to your cubicle and taking something without asking is rude, in some cases unethical, even damaging. It's the same thing with computers. No application/website ever should be able to collect information about me without my consent. It's called a "personal computer".
If the application needs telemetry from me, they can ask (not tell we're doing this, but ask), and start the moment I consent. The moment I withdraw my consent all telemetry and data collection should stop. Moreover, I shall be able to see all the telemetry data in its full glory to make my own assessment of what's collected and how.
If you don't know, Go tried this, even with an arguable provable way of anonymization, people roared back, and the decision is changed to "opt-in".
For some applications, I explicitly consent to telemetry because a) They ask, b) They show what they collect and do with it, and c) I do respect and trust them because of the previous encounters I had with them.
The moment they break this social contract, they lose telemetry, and in most cases me as a user.
I mean, non-consensual telemetry is just recording what you do via your camera all day long, but with light off, without telling you. Replace the camera with any app you use.
Are you comfortable and happy now?
Of course it can be useful & good, but letting people know about what you are doing and asking before doing it is even better, no?
Do the telemetry collectors have something to hide, so they do it covertly or without consent?
> The moment I withdraw my consent all telemetry and data collection should stop.
You can do that by simply going into about:preferences#privacy and unchecking "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla"
> I shall be able to see all the telemetry data in its full glory to make my own assessment of what's collected and how.
That's all available in about:telemetry
Firefox is open source and so is the set of telemetry it collects, the schemas are published openly on the web. Every request to add new telemetry is reviewed in a public bugzilla ticket. It's not a mass of dark surveillance capturing unknown information, it's all done in the open in public.
Then the same people shouldn't make fun of telemetry as unrelated to the success of a product. Also, yes, I had this exchange with many people who don't understand what telemetry is used for, here on HN. HN is big enough that generalising the audience just doesn't work anymore.
Recently Firefox has been especially unreliable loading pages, sometimes pages load extremely slowly while everything is fine on other browsers, sometimes they just don’t load until the browser is restarted, sometimes it happens again right away after doing so.
It happens across devices and profiles, so I assume more people will be experiencing it.
Instead of improving, it has gotten worse over the last couple of years.
Thing is: You have to use the telemetry, you have to actually care. And how much Mozilla care is illustrated well by the plenty 20+ years old open tickets for problems that exist to this day.
They can tell what's popular by what's downloaded from addons.mozilla.org, they don't need telemetry for that. I'm not sure how to read "blocked", but the menu item to report an extension is immediately next to the item to remove it, so I also don't think you need anything more for that.
> failing pages,
I certainly hope they're not sending Mozilla a list of pages I'm visiting, failed or otherwise.
> browser crashes,
Does a restart not still pop up a dialog to ask the user if they want to report the crash? You don't need "telemetry" for that.
Nightly allows uMatrix where Fennec does not. But Nightly has default HSTS which is annoying to users that monitor own traffic on own networks. The number of Mozilla-initiated phone home domains one has to filter when using Firefox is nuts. It should be zero. Option to disable all these unsolicited remote connections quickly and easily should exist.
This is perfect advertising for the Ladybird browser. I hope that some of the developers (if this really goes live on the release channel) will join other projects. I can understand that Mozilla needs money, but I don't think this feature fits with Firefox and what it stands for.
It's bad press for Firefox, but honestly it just makes me want to use the internet less. Ladybird is cool, but the incompatibility with badly-made websites only intensifies the more niche your browser gets. Librewolf or the resurrected Sero browser feels like the next best thing, but even so it feels like a losing battle.
And the example is "Kodak Printomatic Full-Color Instant Print Digital Camera". An absolute Chinese dumpster-filling, for Kodak price. And the off-brand JBL headset, with affiliate link! Nice, this is much better than having an advocacy department.
> We will be running an experiment in December featuring a Fakespot feed in the vertical list on newtab. This list will show products that have been identified as high-quality, and with reliable product reviews. They will link to more detailed Fakespot product pages that will give a breakdown of the product analysis.
Will the products be generic (not targeted at the user based on some profile building) or is there some tracking and profile building going on to “suggest useful products” for that person? Is there going to be a different “Topics” implementation to serve this purpose?
Is there a straightforward way to move an about:config to a new install? The number of things I require to be disabled or changed is mounting and I'm not looking forward to putting Firefox on a new machine.
Criticizing is easy, I'd like all critics to suggest alternatives to how FF development should be funded. I don't like this at all but I also cannot come up with any realistic alternatives.
For one, it would probably help a lot if Mozilla didn't try to be everything at once. They have a specific product niche, but both Firefox and Thunderbird (both of which should be their core development efforts), just don't seem to be what they're focusing on, instead seeming to thinking they have to be the EFF... before MBA rot seems to have kicked in and now Mozilla is a non-profit that owns an internet ad company (whilst deprioritizing and scaling back a bunch of the advocacy efforts that could upset advertisers. It's kinda funny that they're torpedoing their EFF-esque advocacy to invest into a business sector whose core existence runs contrary to their purpose.)
And that's before we dive into just how much they pay their executives and how much they could probably cut into the executive salaries to fund Firefox and Thunderbird before resorting to sponsorship deals.
The Mozilla Foundation isn't the most disconnected free software org where I have the suspicion that a lot of money is being spent on unnecessary side projects or funneled into rainy day funds while begging on the streets like they're poor (they're guilty of the former, they spend too much for the latter), but make no mistake - every major cut in their own browser market share was of their own making. And it's always tied to harebrained schemes to try and inject sponsored shit into Firefox. (Their original major dent that wasn't just gradual decline/rebalance due to Chrome entering the Browser market originated from Mozilla installing a tie-in extension with the show "Mr Robot".)
A lot of statements you throw out here are demonstrably false. It appears that you haven't tried in the least to actually become informed on this topic, and just spout the same tired talking points.
I am critical of some things that Mozilla does, but shouting blatant falsehoods and repeating "exec salary" ad nauseam is not helpful.
I just posted this the other day:
Firefox is massively profitable, (with a rising share of income not coming from Google). Change in net assets before taxes in 2022 was +168 M$, it was +220 M$ in 2021. This is on expenses of 425 M$ in 2022.
Software development was 220 out of the total expenses. General and administrative coming in second at 108 M$.
I don't know exactly what comparable software companies invest, but assuming that the 220 is entirely SWE salaries this seems appropriate overhead to my mind.
Marketing and Branding is next with 58M$ other program services come in at 34 M$.
So yes, Mozilla could drop all income generating activities other than Google without having to cut anything in development. That means staying dependent on selling the search bar to the largest and most invasive advertisment company there has ever been forever.
Instead, they are running a strategy that seems to aim to get independent of Google money as quickly as possible: Build up a war chest, increase other revenue streams. Other revenues are up to 75M$ in 2022 from 56M$ in 2021.
So looking at the actual figures, rather than making stuff up out of nowhere, it does not seem to me that you can accuse them for a lack of strategic focus. Nor have you articulated the actual trade-off they are facing: Rely on Google money or get better at monetizing Firefox in other ways.
Instead you straw-man their activism and make completely unfounded and implausible statements: "every major cut in their own browser market share was of their own making." I am sure that Google using their Web properties and massive ad campaigns to push Chrome and Microsoft using Windows to push Edge had no impact whatsoever.
> So looking at the actual figures, rather than making stuff up out of nowhere, it does not seem to me that you can accuse them for a lack of strategic focus.
$220 millions are the aggregated expenses of ALL software 'development' efforts of Mozilla Corporation like VPN, Relay, Pocket, mozilla.social, etc. And there are a lot of interesting expenses which are billed as development (like MCKENSIE MACK GROUP payments). How much of that went to Firefox nobody knows.
Net assets are growing but user base is shrinking (and of course it was Google and MS who alienated their users in 2016-2018 by introducing a lot of breaking changes and made FF not usable /s). That's why CEO deserves a big fat bonus and raise.
You can't accuse them for a lack of strategic focus, indeed. But what is their strategic focus? Is it filling their pockets with money and living a lavish lifestyle?
What they could do better is move Firefox development into a separate fund and manage it from there. Just like they did with Thunderbird.
They could let users give them money for the browser. The two obvious ways are to make a "Firefox Pro" that is completely identical but with a different logo or something just to let people pay for it, or make a "Firefox Pro" that, y'know, doesn't have ads. The second one doesn't exactly sit well with me but either is better than the current approach.
I see far too many people essentially saying, "If it wasn't funded unethically, it couldn't exist!" Or "my business needs to do [unethical thing] or I can't compete!"
Okay, then it shouldn't exist. That's not an excuse.
The irony is that if Mozilla had just taken the search deal money over the past decade and a half and quietly kept it away in a rainy day fund instead of wasting it all on ideas that mostly didn't go anywhere or reinvented the wheel from existing projects, they probably would be just fine for the rest of their lifetimes.
The only reason they're looking for unethical funding is because a. Mozilla has grown so bloated beyond it's original purpose that they have ludicrous operating demands and b. because they have a bunch of MBA types in charge who can only think up the most unethical schemes you can think of to make money.
iOS only is for sure a limitation but I've been using it for a while and it's great! Chrome and FF add-ons on iOS including full uBlock Origin.
This is exactly the browser HN has been asking for: no ads, not funded by ads, fully funded by users directly paying them. Fully bootstrapped business with the only funding round they've ever taken coming entirely from their user-base.
So we all agree this is bad. How can we show them? They claim to speak the language of telemetry, so how do we speak it to them? What actions must we perform to show that this is undesirable?
Firefox nightly will be running an experiment in December featuring a Fakespot feed in the vertical list on newtab. This list will show products that have been identified as high-quality, and with reliable product reviews. They will link to more detailed Fakespot product pages that will give a breakdown of the product analysis.
I agree with the sentiment but ladybird is years and years away from being on par with Firefox. Performance, compatibility let alone extensions are far away at this point. Exiting to see the development tho.
A few people have mentioned ladybird, and I was going to say "wasn't there some problem with the guy behind it?"
Then I looked. I don't know if I just still need to look further, maybe the guy is actually somehow bad, but having a branch named "master" does not promote freaking slavery. I never bought that stupid master/main nonsense. It was never a valid argument. It's an artificially created problem. You can pick anything like the color of someones shoes and just arbitrarily declare it's some sort of crime, and then when I disregard that, you can technically truthfully accuse me of being insensitive to the issue.
The pr about he/they, that is a little weirder. I would both agree with using the word "they" outside of any other context, like if I were writing the docs the first time, and yet object to the drive-by pr from no actual browser developer or someone actually interested in the project. Mayyybe I'd have accepted the pr anyway if it didn't actually have any other objectionable things, but I also see no problem with someone else having a sort of personal policy to just not entertain every passer-by at their whim. Regardless what they say or want, good or bad.
As far as I can tell I have all exactly the same crime as that guy. The biggest crime of all which is simply not respecting ideas or people that have not earned any respect. Just not caring what someone else says and not giving them what they want, especially when they try to invoke crazy emotional hyperbole.
Fucking people.
So anyway, yeah ladybird is probably still way off, but yeah it looks good.
