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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
> popular or blocked addons,
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.
> etc.
Etc.
https://github.com/mozilla/policy-templates/issues/1130#issu...
Deleted Comment
> 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?
And I guess my references only make sense to "geriatic" millennials and older..
(I am quite young so I have to rely on seminal texts for my historical knowledge)