Chesterton's Fence: Presumably Mozilla has already optimized the privacy and performance of Firefox as much as they've felt comfortable doing. If they could change each of those settings as recommended without tradeoffs to help the user, they would have done so.
Without listing the tradeoffs for each one, this list cannot be relied upon.
What you'll find, as has been the case for Mozilla in some recent decisions, is the tradeoff includes (but is not limited to) profitability and ease-of-use, two things you left off your list of what you think Mozilla optimizes for. That blind trust and invalid set of optimization metrics shouldn't be perpetuated. Granted blind trust in this list is unwise too.
Therefore manually removing all Google partner tracking features in about:config is a very sane choice.
You say still, but this will be the first time in a few years that will probably be true. The details of the Google deal aren't public, but I doubt it forced them to spend the past few months secretly hiding Google tracking into the browser.
In any case this is in my user.js:
user_pref("datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled", false);
user_pref("privacy.trackingprotection.enabled", true);
user_pref("media.autoplay.enabled", false);
Along with ublocko and httpseverywhere, that covers a lot without breaking mostly anything.
A quite famous user.js hardening project is https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js. But I've found that keeping such a complex configuration functional requires a lot of constant effort.
Well when you add that condition, sure.
If you understand that changing one of the defaults only affects ease-of-use, and you're a power user, more power to you! If you want to turn off analytics, cool!
But it gets trickier when it gets to the safebrowsing feature. The gist says to turn off all of those components, rather than just the ones that send hashed or partial file and address metadata to Google. That's not helping anybody.
(To be fair, I'd actually reword my original comment to change "worthless or dangerous" to something milder at this point, but HN won't let me do it. Oh well.)
Exactly.
> That's not helping anybody.
It helps the people that optimize for privacy above their own security in this case. From my understanding of the algorithm, you can't really leverage safe browsing properly without being willing to check the full hash via an internet call at some point. So might as well have it off or on. An extremely paranoid user might not want a safe-browsing download to occur at all, informing Google when their computer is on. These are paranoid stances, but it is a list of settings for that. I use a Chromium-based browser that doesn't use safe browsing lists and I accept the risks.
Also, although I also think the proposed "upload" is poor wording, as many people seeing that will be confused because buttons that say that usually then request what to upload (e.g. "hmm, maybe it's asking for a local image to upload to the cloud for storage?"). You actually are saveing in both cases, in one case to the cloud, inthe other case to the disk. Thus, "Save to cloud" and "Save to disk" (or "Save locally") are much better options in my mind.
I assume they have some metric for success of the experiment tracking daily uploads to FF screenshots and they're unwilling to sacrifice that.
That doesn't really make a lot of sense though - the experiment was specifically launched with the goal of trying to solve the problem of sharing screenshots with others; a problem they identified as common through user research. So while I think there's a lot to say for changing the wording, the primary action will always be sharing it.
- and a reason they're still available for people in crowds like hacker news* readers etc.
All of software has been around less than a century; the concept of personal computers running software that an end-user might adjust settings on is about sixty years old; thinking about Internet security is roughly thirty years old; the modern web ecosystem is no older than JavaScript, 22 years old.
You're still right that blindly changing settings is not a great idea, but the Chesterton's Fence analogy is misplaced.