I was shocked when I reviewed the Firefox repo. Firefox has a ton of telemetry code.
Edit: to the downvoters - why would you downvote a true statement. Have you read the code?
Edit: to the downvoters - why would you downvote a true statement. Have you read the code?
The telemetry bits can be disabled easily. A new firefox installation (or rather, a new firefox profile) will open in a tab: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ . That website has a button under the "Improve performance and stability for users everywhere" section that will bring you directly to the section of the preferences where you can disable telemetry and crash reports and such.
Did you read the privacy page?
PS: Firefox used to pop up a small notification bar at the bottom on fresh profiles instead of that privacy pge that asked you to allow telemetry data sharing. That seems to be gone now. The previous solution was more obvious about the stuff but also worse UI/UX. The privacy page could and should be improved to make the preferences button more visible or at least not-hidden in a collapsed section by default.
If it's not disabled by default, this means nothing for 99% of users.
The reason I ask is because if telemetry is off by default it is useless.
As long as they are trustworthy and up front about it and makes it easy to disable it this is ok with me.
A relevant question then is you find Mozilla trustworthy. I cannot give you an easy answer to that.
Do we have a thorough and detailed list of what information is possible in the default Firefox telemetry?
As to ff vs chrome, what I figure is: I'd rather have poorly funded code defending my privacy than well-funded code defeating my privacy.
The set of telemetry collected by default depends on the build channel: release builds collect much less data than nightly or beta.
You can also see exactly what data Firefox engineers can see at https://telemetry.mozilla.org/ -- there is no special behind-a-login view for this stuff that I know of.
Disclaimer: I work on Firefox.
They all include expiry dates, and probes with perpetual lifetimes require devs to take responsibility for them.
All probes need to go through the data collection process outlined at [3].
[1] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...
[2] https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...
Every telemetry probe requires a privacy review in addition to the code review. If you want more, the source code is available online. Do you have more in mind?
* Sentiment was sharply NEGATIVE not so long ago... when Firefox cut off support for the legacy plugin ecosystem.
* Sentiment was POSITIVE not so long before that... when Quantum shipped. Improving performance, and delighting the Rust crowd.
* Sentiment was NEGATIVE not so long before that... as Mozilla was too distracted by mobile OS misadventures, and Firefox's performance had become awful relative to its competitors.
* Sentiment was POSITIVE not so long before that... as Mozilla was the only voice somewhat pushing against DRM in HTML5 standards.
And so on.
At any rate, I don't think you're being downvoted due to a pro-Firefox brigage. I think you're being downvoted because you are posting in an immature "Reddit" style, without contributing much of interest to the discusion, and that style generally does not fare well here.