You probably don't want to run Firefox Nightly any more

You're giving Mozilla a bit too much due. This was not just a statement or suggestion but an announcement for the next Monday.

With an internal policy that all opt-out proposals requiring the transfer of personalized data must be discussed with the rest of the team (incl. PR) and publicly, the post would have sounded quite differently.

By the way, in less than three hours, there will be an AMA on /r/firefox with the Project Manager of the User Advocacy team at Mozilla:

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/84xe7m/well_be_hos...

FWIW, Chromium is also also developed in such a way that at least commits, code reviews, and discussions on issues are visible on the bug tracker.

The reality is that they've given up on all other companies, so people are very sensitive to losing their one remaining chance of privacy, especially if that's the only reason they're using Firefox to begin with.

> Mozilla is the only company who cares about privacy actually, so I feel people shouldn't go completely nuts every time they spot something small in an experimental version.

But, small question: isn't the Nightly an experimental version?

> documented process with the community, in public

You mean exactly like it's happenning in the mailing list right now? Even when the discussion is public, it seems some people prefer to rant on social media instead of contributing to the official discussion.

> follow a lengthy documented process with the community, in public (similar to RFC in ietf and wikipedia)

Is this not exactly what is happening in the bug tracker and the mailing list?

You can find the policies and procedures around data collection at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Data_Collection

FYI, I work at Mozilla but don't speak for Mozilla.

Oh yeah because it’s been totally stagnant! Right guys? Oh because it reports all the telemetry by default back to Microsoft, oh shit that’s edge. Because it’s been breaking web standards and trying to make the world chrome rather than being a world player. Ah got it.

Presumably it's a reference to the way peak-usage IE created custom requirements and ignored established standards - partly to undermine other browsers, partly just because they were too big to care.

Chrome defaulted top-level event listeners to passive with no real warning or discussion. Chrome no longer passes Acid 3 like it used to. I'm not a web-dev, but I know the list goes on at some length.

So the concern here, whatever its merit, is that Chrome is now undermining other browsers and changing the web for its own benefit.

People simply want to be outraged, period :/

While looking glass was indeed delivered in release (to my knowledge) the code was not active until configuration changes were made, at worst that means mozilla delivered unnecessary bloat to the user.

While I do agree that Nightly is to some extend "we need crash reports with a list of all the pornhub tabs you had open", I think in this case they should inform users that they are doing this. The study only lasts a week so people can fallback to normal mozilla if they don't like the potential to be the 50% being "tracked".

I hope Mozilla takes this as an opportunity to A) give the networking team a lecture on how to not word a shield study proposal and B) do something to avoid people thinking all shield studies are bad. They aren't.

Because the option C) is "people should learn not to only read the first message in a proposal discussion and assume this is how they will do it" I find it unlikely that it will be possible, given the modern outrage culture in social media.

Participate in the mailing lists, in the bug trackers.

Submit code patches and report bugs.

In short, participate in the Mozilla community.

Mozilla isn't some sort of impenetrable wall of silence, everything they do is open. The initial mailing list thread that start the entire outrage is open. People on it raised these exact concerns. People engaged them. They want to prevent these exact PR disasters.

"Nothing else seems to be working" is simply untrue if you simply look at the bugtracker and mailing list.

I would suggest that you bring "Nothing else seems to be working" to Google and the Chrome dev team. I haven't heard much outcry from that direction yet and they regularly come up with decisions previously undiscussed with the public and then push it through no arguments about it. Mozilla is not like that no matter how much you want to believe it.

Yeah, totally agree. Mozilla needs user data like this for their product, and I think it's a perfectly reasonable solution to collect it from Nightly users who have opted into being guinea pigs.

> I'm a strong advocate for privacy but if I'm going to give away my data I'd rather have it be Mozilla than Facebook or Google.

Yep. There's no company I trust more than Mozilla when it comes to handling my data in a safe and responsible manner.

Sure that's all fine if you are aware of it and agree with it.

Isn't it the same as Cambridge Analytica? That was a feature of Facebook to share your friend information... it still makes it bad.

The fact that Mozilla has good intention doesn't change how it was done. Secrecy isn't the solution, it only pushes toward these kinds of publications and outrage. If it was known, believe me, we wouldn't be here having that discussion, it would be a non-issue.

I hate to victim blame, but he's entirely at fault for the predicament he's in. It was widely known that legacy extensions would be phased out it 56, and a few searches related to firefox 56 will tell you that ESR would be the only branch that supports both legacy extensions AND will recieve security patches past 56. So he should have switched over to ESR before 53 came out.

Your comment is somewhat out of place in this case; Firefox ESR 52 is the current up-to-date ESR¹ release. Firefox ESR is kept up-to-date with security patches, just like the vanilla evergreen Firefox. The difference is that the ESR is branched yearly from the main-line, and leaves out all functional patches — only security patches get applied.

This helps organizations who want to test all their tools before moving to a new version. The next ESR release (Firefox ESR 60) will be this summer.

1: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/

Citation needed. DNS-based block lists (e.g. Pi-hole) appear to work fine on Chrome.

> I don't exactly trust Google any further, but I at least feel they are more upfront about their intention and don't push seemingly arbitrary experiments out to users

How do you know what experiments Google is running on unsuspecting Chrome users right now? This conversation arose precisely because Mozilla announced it on a public mailing before the experiment started. You can see any current or past Firefox experiments that you've been in on Firefox's about:studies page.

I work at Mozilla, but not on these experiments.

A more charitable assessment might be that Mozilla is trying to serve too many use-cases. Chrome is quite happy doing the 20% work that gets them 80% of the userbase, and all the users that Chrome happily sidelines come running to Firefox.

That's cool, but some of those users have wildly different priorities, like we see in this case. Some users want protection from interference by their government or their ISP, and couldn't care less if some of their metadata winds up in a database on the other side of the world. Other users are quite relaxed about their local government or ISP, but don't want any of their stuff entering US jurisdiction. And it's not practical to set up a world-wide infrastructure of DNS-over-HTTPS servers just to find out whether it's worthwhile.

It's not so much that Mozilla feels "they can use user devices for whatever they like", as much as Mozilla's at a local maximum, and trying to improve anything for some part of their userbase means neglecting some other part, even if only temporarily. And then the neglected parts feel betrayed.

And that it was a marketing campaign produced in partnership with a television show that somehow wound up in Firefox. What it did or didn't actually do is almost beside the point to those of us who care.

Even Google, an advertising company, is not so brazen as to market third-parties in its own browser.

> When my data ends up at a third party, especially without my knowledge, I'm much more concerned about it being sold and or shared further.

As stated in the mailing list thread linked in the article, Mozilla has a legal agreement with Cloudflare that the data will not be stored long-term, let alone sold or shared. My reading is that they're keeping information about DNS requests and responses, but not who made the request, for 24 hours for debugging purposes, and then getting rid of all logs. The data they're actually interested in is performance, not the DNS flow itself.

You're welcome to decide that Mozilla's trust in other companies is misplaced even if they get a signed contract, and if you do, that would be a good reason to cease using Firefox (Nightly or otherwise!). But if you're not of that opinion, it doesn't make sense to worry that the data simply happens to go through a third party.

(Also, what third parties see your DNS data today? Do you think your ISP is not tracking this?)

> You can also be quite sure that they'll want to keep that data to themselves.

I've traditionally made the same argument. I still mostly believe it WRT Google. Facebook's current woes with Cambridge Analytica has hurt my confidence in this some.

> When my data ends up at a third party, especially without my knowledge, I'm much more concerned about it being sold and or shared further.

That or stolen thanks to negligent data handling practices. Or maybe both (e.g. Equifax).

so again, how does this make DOH worse than 8.8.8.8?

Extending your argument only a bit, "No one is forcing you to use Firefox stable release version if it is not consistent with your faith". "No one is forcing you to use computers and internet if they are not consistent with your faith". I see so much irony in your statement. It's not about forcing anyone. It's about taking the web forward, and data security which Mozilla says it believes in. Nightly definitely means there could be unintentional mistakes and bugs, but does not mean it has our blanket agreement to intentionally sharing all of our private data by default.

Or perhaps the developers could just request consent before taking your data?

I mean if that is just too difficult then what hope do they have of developing anything.

That's certainly one approach.

The other approach is that, unless explicit consent is given, people are supposed to be safe.

Nightly is often required because a lot of functionality for developers is only available there, e.g. custom xpi legacy addons even in FF61.

It's nightly or nothing for this, and as a reminder, stable also was affected by CliqZ.

The mills of bureaucracy run slow, I realize that.

But it's the office of my local data privacy officer that has in the past sued basically every website in Germany for using the Facebook/Twitter like buttons, and won (and caused them all to use a two-click share button system).

I've got trust in them that they'll act responsibly on this.