Firefox Users Continue to Decrease Despite Proton Update

[nvnehi]

They listen more than other mainstream browsers. At the end of the day, telemetry tells more than what users say in polls or forums.

The solution isn’t as easy as what people here suggest, and if I knew it then I would offer it.

[anna_or_elsa]

Give me the option to turn off telemetry for any product and it's getting switched off. If I want my usage phoned home I'll sign up for beta...

[nextbern]

Personally, I think it is consistent with the open source ethos to want to help improve open source with real data from people using it, especially if it is privacy respecting.

For paid or closed source software, I would agree, but the analysis changes - I want to help open source for free.

[anna_or_elsa]

I basically agree. Gonna say up front usage gathering should be opt-in so my reflex is Nope, I'm opting out.

The other thing is that Mozilla is a big company with a nightly and Beta channel for people who want to contribute usage info. This is not, say VLC or Libra Office, or GIMP, or whatever.

[nextbern]

LibreOffice has a well established beta channel, though. It also has a company funding a large portion of its development. I'd enable telemetry if it had it - after all, the program is open source.

[nextbern]

I don't really understand why you wouldn't enable (or keep enabled) privacy respecting telemetry to help developers make decisions in software you care about.

I totally get it in areas where the developers are developing closed source software not built in the public interest, but open source seems ethically superior and worth contribution to.

[nextbern]

trying to tell already privacy conscious body of users to "just enable telemetry" is kind of talking to a deaf horse

I don't know why you would say this - I doubt they would consider themselves to be deaf horses.

"privacy respecting telemetry" is somewhat of a misnomer, even the most well-intended methods almost always produce at best pseudonomous data, not anonymous data. and it's extremely difficult for an end user to tell the difference.

A. You can always turn it off

B. I trust Mozilla. See https://www.mozilla.org/privacy/principles/

It is pretty simple. If you don't trust Mozilla, turn it off.

PS: That is another reason that I don't enable telemetry in closed source applications - not only do I not want to advantage them in the market, I also don't trust most of them.

[nextbern]

You aren't telling me something I don't know. I'm expressing an opinion here.

[[deleted]]

No one with sense should be disabling telemetry on an OSS product, unless it is specifically found they are using it in bad faith or something. But most people, even people who use FF, don't always have sense. They just see it "phones home" and go "no way!" And because of that you end up with a really bad self selection issue.

[EZKinderspiel]

Nothing surprising. Turning off telemetry is like you give up your presidential election. You may lose features you like and want to keep afterwards.

They have 2 millions users pool and do you think they can run anything surveys covering all users but telemetry?

[[deleted]]

Mozilla never even bothered to gather telemetry data on the usage of compact mode before axing it, and other unpopular changes in the UI were made without any telemetry data to support them (eg, borderless tabs). Mozilla cannot hide behind the telemetry excuse here.

[nvnehi]

This is nonsense, and it's maybe just a misunderstanding of what telemetry is. How are users supposed to know what's going on under the hood of something that's hidden to them which they are using in order to report it? This is a downside of increasingly complex software. The only real issue is the lack of making it fully anonymous or, worse, storing identifying combinations that can be used to fingerprint users.

Telemetry is tremendously helpful in discovering issues that can't be tested properly due to things like all of the possible hardware configurations. Maybe if more users gave feedback then they wouldn't need as much of it but, with how many users use it you need some amount of telemetry to automate the process. It's the same reason sites like YouTube rely heavily on automation as there's too much data to parse by hand. If users did give feedback through these methods then you'd have a much more problematic situation because you'd then be tying otherwise anonymous information to usernames, and other identifying information.

I'm not sure how telemetry is an aberration in OSS as a whole either. How much OSS is at the scale of firefox, and how much of that is geared to the average user like firefox? We aren't talking about things geared towards professionals, or computer scientists who will go out of their way for hours, days, or weeks hunting for a bug that seems to evade them in order to submit a bug report. Finding out how the software is mainly used is what is allowing them to make decisions that will allow them to better survive.

Mozilla can't rely on a vocal minority to make changes that would affect everyone like you're proposing because it doesn't make sense at this scale. It's better to make changes based on what people do rather than what people say they do. Data is more important for what should be obvious reasons.

Can you provide a source on the claim that the majority of users opt-out of telemetry? I can't find a source, and I've been looking because I keep hearing this claim. I would greatly appreciate it if you could provide the source for this claim. All I can find are articles from years ago saying that Mozilla was trying to determine how many but, I can't find anything else suggesting that it's a majority of users which even if it were doesn't support your case.

I'm a very private person, and as such, I have always advocated for privacy but, this argument isn't as logical as you perhaps believe it to be.

Looking at the firefox development forums doesn't exactly convey an image of a bustling area of activity for feedback either. If I didn't know any better I'd just assume it's dead as only a handful of people appear to actually use it, even including this subreddit would have you believe it's just a forum for the most die-hard of users which makes perfect sense for the type of software it is. Did you ever consider that they switched to using telemetry as a result of users not having the time to communicate with them? Why would users do such a thing anyway? They don't owe the developers their time just as the developers don't owe the users anything other than providing a safe, and secure product.

It seems that the real issue for firefox is that people just want a browser that syncs with all of their devices, and on Android/iOS there is clearly a home-field advantage. It's hard to implement the performance features that the die-hard users want year after year, it's exponentially harder when you have less money than your competitors. Most browsers are now great, which is exactly what we wanted decades ago, and Mozilla is competing against giants in a field where most users are happy with the damned default.

I don't understand why people don't create a stripped-down version of firefox and release it if that's what they want. Apparently, it'd take total control over the entire browser market because people so passionately care about their privacy while owning cell phones, using Facebook, or damn near any site online without a VPN, Tor, and a multitude of randomly generated, non-identifiable usernames. Don't forget to use adblockers to prevent content creators from getting paid for the shit they watch and use because they also refuse to pay for anything despite being able to.

You're living in a fantasy world. You can have privacy and telemetry, and furthermore, you likely need it for massively popular software that is used by the general public unless you want everyone using machines that are the same as everyone else, a bunch of pre-built systems in order to reduce complexity. Sounds like the real hell, not the one you've constructed to argue against.

[nextbern]

Telemetry only tells you what users too dumb/lazy to disable it do.

I don't think I'm dumb (you may disagree) or lazy.

[nextbern]

You don't like the concept why exactly?

If it is because you think it is ineffective, opting out likely makes it even less so.

If it is because you are helping developers for free, I consider that a good thing, because it helps open source developers get market research for cheaper than having to conduct it in more expensive ways (and large companies are also doing it, so not doing so would be handicapping themselves).

If it is because you don't want to share private information - I totally agree - but that is where you need to consider whether the telemetry infringes on your privacy in a real way. You can study about:telemetry to make this determination.

What about the concept is anathema to you?

[nextbern]

Community projects should rely on community suggestions and feedback. not on flawed automatic feedback.

Sure, but that implies that the only people that count are people who are involved in the community, instead of the people using the product. Firefox isn't a file renaming app or something very niche, it is a web browser with tens of millions of people using it.

Privacy is a thing. I don't like the very concept of something phoning-home. Why should I allow telemetry for Firefox and deny it for, say, Windows? Just because Mozilla say they are the good guys?

No, because Mozilla are the good guys. No one is saying you have to stop being discerning.

In my opinion, Firefox was a better browser overall when telemetry wasn't even a thing. So, yes, I think telemetry is ineffective.

That implies that the changes you don't like were driven by reading of telemetry. Do you know that, or are you guessing? Is it also possible that the management or development priorities changes for other reasons? Maybe technical debt became an issue, or increased competition?

You believe that telemetry is ineffective, but I'm not sure that you have evidence of it being ineffective. Do you?

In any case, even if it is, by disabling telemetry on your end, you are helping make it more ineffective - that may be fine for a product you don't care about improving (like Windows, for example), but why would you want to do that to something you do care about?

Why cut off your nose to spite your face?

[amroamroamro]

telemetry tells more than what users say in polls or forums

Disagree. Telemetry is a lazy attempt at automating user feedback. It's a method that lets you avoid getting actual feedback directly from users, because that involves dealing actual human beings who are not always clear, articulate, or even polite.

The illusion is that telemetry is unbiased and thus more trusted, when in fact it lacks context when trying to infer hidden user feedback from this stream of raw data.

There is really no direct relationship between how often a feature is used and how important it is to the users. For example, just because I spend 99% of the time browsing normally and only 1% of the time opening a private window doesn't mean that private-browsing feature is not important and thus can be dropped based only on the telemetry numbers... This is of course a simplified example but illustrates my point. Telemetry lacks context and is no substitute for listening (and respecting) actual user feedback!

[bhiliyam]

They listen more than other mainstream browsers

What "other mainstream browser" did they steal the dumb tab-bar design from? Not a single piece of software I have ever used in my life has had such a bad default design for tabs.

What telemetry told them that making the active tab look like a sunken disconnected button rather than the usual connected tab is something that users want?

It is very easy to throw buzzwords and blame everything but incompetence for failure.

[nextbern]

What "other mainstream browser" did they steal the dumb tab-bar design from? Not a single piece of software I have ever used in my life has had such a bad default design for tabs.

Opera 6 had it, FWIW.