Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

I generally trust Mozilla, but I really don't understand what they are going to get out of the data. Their explanation leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps it's simply because I don't work on browsers?

How does seeing which sites users use that need Flash drive their decision-making. Either they support Flash, or they don't.

And- ditto for "Jank" (not sure I understand that term, frankly- why is it capitalized?). Some developers don't optimize well- how is Mozilla going to use this? I think they do a good job over on MDN.

I guess I'd like to be sure I understand what problem they are trying to solve. Maybe they feel like without understanding their users they can't keep up with Chrome. I see people talking about how good Chrome is. And I must admit- it is sweet for me too. But that may be because (1) I don't have it loaded up with add-ons like I do Mozilla and (2) they have optimized for certain sites like youtube and gmail and I just can't get Firefox to work all that well on those sites.

But I'm not convinced that they need my data to fix that.

EDIT: On the other hand, Chrome seems to lose my passwords on every upgrade so it won't be my main browser until if fixes that little issue, which is going on, what, 5 years now?

(Disclaimer: I work for Mozilla.)

"Jank" is our internal term for slow, non-responsive interaction with the browser (the capitalization of it in the original message is a little peculiar). If you click your mouse button, and then a second or more later, the item that you were clicking on the screen responds? That's jank. That input form that's not keeping up with your typing? That's jank. And so on.

We can (and do) collect statistics on how much jank people are experiencing, and we can look for ways to improve those statistics, but knowing what particular sites (not complete URLs, just eTLD+1 sites) jank occurs on is much more actionable. Browser developers can go visit particular sites to experience and analyze the jank for themselves, or we can see what janky sites are particularly popular in a given region and focus our efforts on improving those sites--either by doing things more efficiently in the browser, or reaching out to the site developers and asking them to consider changing things to make their site work better in Firefox. (Complete URLs would be even more actionable, but we don't want to collect your complete browser history.)

The argument for Flash is similar: we can get aggregate usage numbers for Flash, and perhaps see how that correlates to jankiness (or crashiness, or what have you), but having some information on what sites are using Flash makes the data even more actionable, for similar reasons as those given above.

Spending resources optimizing Firefox for how sites implement their JS seems over the top. The heaviest sites tend to be the most mainstream anyway, imo, and those are easy to pick out.

I am a Mozilla supporter for more than a decade, but this is the wrong move.

> How does seeing which sites users use that need Flash drive their decision-making. Either they support Flash, or they don't.

I'm not saying I support this proposal or not, but here's an example of why this could be useful: Chrome was considering deprecating some API, because it wasn't supported by other browsers and they didn't think that it was used very much.

They collected generic statistics about how much it was used, but the numbers turned out to be much higher than expected, so they were considering leaving it alone. What if some fairly popular website they just hadn't heard of used the API? You might not want to break it, or at least you'd want to get in touch with the site to see if they could move to a more widely supported API.

In the end, they somehow (maybe through spidering, or somebody just happened across it in their own browsing) figured out that the high usage was due to being used by some ad network for fingerprinting. Not only was this not a reason to keep supporting the API, it was a reason to stop supporting it!

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