(Edit: I should add that I think you're asking a very valid philosophical question that my opinion as a user of Firefox doesn't fully address)
Firefox marketing is effective but to be clear they have begun changing direction, pursuing a more practical "attracting the masses" approach (a la Signal) rather than paranoid/hyper-vigilant/engineer-style idealism (something some misinterpret Firefox marketing as still claiming), and as a result Firefox has been forced to course-correct several times due to public outcry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144
A recent eye-opener for me personally was discovering telemetry's switch from opt-in to opt-out as of September.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-de... (3 months ago) vs. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_... (3 years ago)
Telemetry has been held as one of the main justification for the change as it supposedly showed only a fraction of users used ALSA. It turned out to be a combination of misinterpretation of collected data (installed libpulse does not mean not using ALSA) and a complete ignorance of the real world (most linux distros disable telemetry because privacy, people using ALSA are often the same that take extra measures to protect their privacy hence disabling mozilla spying mechanisms).
As a consequence mozilla pushed hard for package maintainers to enable telemetry in linux distros and sadly most did, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285201 http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/firefox.git/commit/?...
Compare to this from 7 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667577
The fun part was when mozilla people started patronizing users for protecting their privacy and told them that it's their fault if ALSA got dropped and that they should relinquish their privacy instead or they will be ignored:
Second, continuing to opt out of telemetry will just make problems
like this worse. As was stated in this thread, one of the
justifications for removing ALSA support was that the telemetry
numbers showed a very little ALSA usage. If more ALSA users had
telemetry enabled, perhaps the outcome would have been different.
In any case, running without telemetry means not having a say in
data-driven decisions about what configurations Mozilla should
support. It's OK to disable telemetry (that's why it's
user-controllable), but both users and distros that make decisions on
users' behalf should to take into account that if don't let Firefox
send info about your system config to Mozilla, your system config is
invisible to Mozilla's decision making about what to support.
There was no course correction here, ALSA is still out despite the issue being entirely to mozilla implementation and not ALSA abilities, despite this being an edge case for linux netflix users with a specific 5.1 setup and despite someone coming forward to offer to fix and maintain their broken code.
Did I mention that they failed to mention this change in release notes, that firefox displayed a message inviting people to click a link to learn why their browser suddenly lost the ability to play sound but the link was broken and that this was an ESR release?
So when I read some mozilla marketing PR about them pretending to champion user privacy, I'm nonplussed at best.
Thanks for taking the time to document the details of this particular situation which I've never heard about before. I wonder how many other mildly upsetting (?? - per "nonplussed at best") decisions are currently accumulating under the radar. Each time another pops up I'm amazed at how much Mozilla has successfully swept under the rug.
The two I knew of are including Paper by default for some time (after taking heat for this, then acquiring it a year later... though I didn't see it when I just checked) and sticking with opt-_out_ for Google Analytics on the add-ins page. After digging recently thanks to the Mr. Robot stuff I discovered the opt-out Cliqz add-on for Germany and now your anecdote.
This seems to imply that doNotTrack would have been successful for its intended purpose had it not been a default setting at one point, which feels like wishful thinking.
Sure, that aspect made it impractical for uncharacteristically privacy-minded companies in the space to support the header, but the vast majority of companies in the business of tracking and advertising would have ignored it anyways, because there's zero consequence for not doing so.
Anyways 95% of the time you just have to disable scripts from the websites to unbreak them.
do not track was never a good idea as respecting it was on a voluntary basis, meaning it was mostly an additional metrics to use to track and profile people who do not want to be tracked. It's a no brainer really that if you did not want to be tracked you should not enable it. Remember ghostery ? same thing all over again.
Actually it is to be the dominant browser on the market, mozilla name means mosaic killer, as in dethrone NCSA Mosaic and take its place as the n°1 browser by market share and was the internal name for netscape.
They kept the name for the continuation of the effort though the target had moved to IE who actually took over Mosaic. Now the target is google chrome and the historical meaning is lost on most people but the intent is still to have the bigger market share because monies.