How considerate of them, I felt I didn't have enough auto-updating background agents yet.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
There's probably an advanced setting buried somewhere if you _really_ want to turn that behavior off, but why would you?
Because updates can introduce breaking changes. And potentially new security vulnerabilities.
but you can flip the switch if you really must.
Linus calls this trading old bugs for new bugs, and is vehemently against introducing commits that may introduce new bugs, no matter the severity of the bug that the commit squashes.
You can create a policy for it
{
"policies": {
"DisableAppUpdate": true
}
}
Not sure why you want to do that, as updates are essential for security. Apparently it's for 'enterprise organizations' who probably want to limit the chatiness of their network and reduce latency.
You could also install Firefox ESR which doesn't ping Mozilla for updates nearly every 10 seconds.
There's an economically powerful EU country that has a lot of train travel and not so many trains having great internet access. This was my commute life for a few years.
Most people don't.
For the rare people that do (probably 100 on the entire planet), they can disable the automatic updates and do it manually.
I have no problem with automatic updates I can disable.
- Browser updates often carry more than just security fixes, which may or may not be wanted by the user
- Background updates make it less likely for the user to know why their software is being updated
- The user may have a legitimate reason for sticking with an older version of a piece of software
- Most browsers already show the user when a new update is available. For users interested in all of the latest security updates, they can read about what these are and simply download the update right away
It's a good thing that this feature can be configured.
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/04/28/mozilla-is-working-on-fire...
"Bother the user with a dialog that lets them shoot themselves in the foot every time there's an update." isn't a good solution to that problem. Firefox's Extended Support Release[1] is a better one, but even with that users will need to accept a feature update eventually.
There may be legitimate situations where it does make sense to turn off automatic updates (that's why the option is there), but they're very niche and require a lot of expertise to pull off without compromising security. Well designed software should intentionally make it hard to disable critical security features without knowing what you're doing.
I also don't think informing users about the contents of an update usually meets the bar where it is "absolutely necessary" to interrupt them just for that. Unless your update is about to break something important (which you should certainly avoid if at all possible) patch notes shouldn't be required reading.
I'd stop right at "auto-installation of updates with security fixes is the correct default", because that's very solid.
And updates that don't install until you open the program. Sparkle apps on macOS do this and it drives me nuts.
If you're going to update or want my attention about a new thing, have a red dot somewhere that is not conspicuous. Don't get in the way of a user trying to be a user. This is one thing that the Slack app gets absolutely right.
Firefox toes the line. New versions occasionally pop up a new window. It's easy to close but jarring. At least the updates happen mostly transparently and tend to not radically change appearance or behavior. They're bringing this experience to Windows now.
If there is any application I want to autoupdate, it's my web-browser. It's a giant bundle of security vulnerabilities whose main purpose in life is to hit untrusted servers that might be sending me malware, and when an update is available to me, the list of security fixes is also available to attackers.
I'm starting to feel like I should just run Qubes.
But generally it's just annoying.
It definitely requires thinking differently and sometimes simple things are less simple, but overall I feel it's worth it. It's rewarding to feel that you're in control.
Some things I like:
- Having password manager in a Qube(/VM) that cannot access the internet (and the VMs that can, are of course isolated from the password VM).
- Logging out of your bank, and when they tell you to "clear your cache and cookies", you do one better and actually destroy the whole OS, because you opened the browser in a disposable VM.
- Needing to attach the microphone (or camera) to a VM before it can be used.
- Ability to have specific VMs' network go through a VPN/Tor.
edit: oh yeah, and consider trying Qubes 4.1 release candidate, which could possibly have better hardware compatibility.
When Firefox releases to Windows Store (https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/web-browsers/mozilla-firefox/...) they will probably let Windows update it, and use this self-updater only for standalone installs.
It would be nice if rather than reinventing the wheel for the billionth time, apps could just use the OS based update mechanisms where possible. (i.e. App calls apt, or snap, or winget, or windows store, which updates Firefox).
Whether that be store based or packaged based. It really sucks both in resources and UX when apps bundle their own update/install mechanism.
Finally yesterday I got so sick of Microsoft's incessant prompts to try Bing, and shoving news and ads in the new tab page, and integrating Bing rewards, etc. that I said I was done and moved back to Chrome.
First thing I did when I opened Chrome was to go into the settings and update it since I hadn't opened it in I-don't-know-how-long and I was surprised to see it was already on the latest version. Great to know it was wasting system resources to update itself without me knowing even though I wasn't using it, and don't even have a process indicator for Chrome in my system tray
I'm guessing they are improving it so the UX for updates involves even less effort for users.
It's not clear to me if MozillaMaintenance is the service that will be checking for updates, or if there is a new service.
It was the first thing I'd nuke before allowing my PC to reconnect to the internet, the second was to nuke every talk-home-Mozilla link that about:config would allow to either be changed or deleted. This worked, as updates wouldn't even work when clicking 'updates' in the menu.
Mozilla has a damned hide to automate updates, not to mention gathering data about users' habits without telling them what's been gathered, and also not allowing users to turn off that collection if they wished.
(BTW, we know the depth of this surveillance just by looking at Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage. There's no way Mozilla would know that data unless Firefox's surveillance of its users had been all-pervasive.)
By going the way of the rest of the industry, Mozilla is shooting itself in the foot. People who've used Firefox in the past have done so because they want an alterative - not more of the same.
I expect Mozilla will go defunct soon, it's now been on its self-destruct path for too long for it to be rescued.
Exactly!
Despite of all the telemetry Mozilla still has absolutely zero clue who their core audience actually is, because they sure as hell are set on decimating what's left of it.
It's bizarre. It's almost as if moles from other browser manufacturers have been smuggled surreptitiously onto Mozilla's staff to sabotage the Firefox project.
But then, perhaps that's a bit too close for comfort if you work for Mozilla.
Bad faith or just plain stupidity, you cannot escape the fact that Firefox is on a fast slippery slope to obivlion and that Mozilla personnel have done nothing to arrest the process in recent years.
Why not? What's driving them to continually implement features and policies that clearly turn users off using Firefox?
"Don't assume bad faith in everybody who doesn't think the same way that you do."
I usually don't, in fact I always welcome a solid debate but there comes a time when things go so wrong or turn so bizarre that one has to look to offtrack ideas for an explanation.
If you've a better rational reason (or perhaps inside knowledge) for why Mozilla continually shoots itself in the foot then many of us would like to hear it.
Edit: I usually use the Firefox fork Palemoon to get around many of Firefox's most egregious features but I'd prefer not to do that as it increases my vulnerability to browser fingerprinting,etc., as such, I have to take additional remedial action such as spoofing the user agent for a more common one - and frankly it's a damn pain having to do so.
You ought to be able to at least understand why many of us are so annoyed when essentially the last independent browser manufacturer is seemingly (willingly) attempting suicide .
You'd obviously be able to uninstall this, too. If your OS allows third-party programs to install services that can not be disabled or uninstalled, the problem is deeper than just the programs you are installing; you need a different OS.
> Mozilla has a damned hide to automate updates, not to mention gathering data about users' habits without telling them what's been gathered, and also not allowing users to turn off that collection if they wished.
Telemetry is optional. You can disable it. I can understand disliking Mozilla or Firefox's direction, but I absolutely don't understand this paranoid, cynical doomposting and straight-up misinformation about one of the only browsers where you can actually outright disable telemetry, and where you can still separate the address bar from the search bar to avoid leaking information.
> we know the depth of this surveillance just by looking at Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage. There's no way Mozilla would know that data unless Firefox's surveillance of its users had been all-pervasive.
What do you expect to happen when you check the "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" other than them sending data about how people use the browser to Mozilla? It even has a link right next to it in the settings where you can see what data is used. You can know the "depth of this surveillance" by just clicking "learn more" and reading the very first section you are linked to, titled "Interaction data".
More importantly, what do you actually propose? What browser are you using that is much more private and secure than Firefox, and allows you the same flexibility in controlling the level of privacy you actually want?
Likely so, or I'd never install it. The OSes I use do allow one to uninstall it: specifically Linux, heavily rooted, fully deGoogleized Android and and a highly-hacked Windows 7† (wouldn't be seen dead with any later version for the same reasons).
"Telemetry is optional."
Turning off telemetry is optional for only some of Firefox's telemetry. The first thing Firefox does when launched is to contact home irrespective of how normal user settings are set. And as we well know, most users will use the defaults and Mozilla is counting on this quirk of human nature.
If Mozilla's bona fides were actually genuine and not sleight of hand then it would default all and every bit of telemetry to off and allow the user to switch it on if he or she so desired. BTW, I don't buy the argument that only some of the phone-home data counts as telemetry; by definition, any data sent to Mozilla is telemetry.
"What browser are you using that is much more private and secure than Firefox, and allows you the same flexibility in controlling the level of privacy you actually want?"
Palemoon. Read my 'Edit' in another of your related posts. Please note: that edit was posted before I'd read this post of yours.
__
† For starters, Internet Explorer code no longer exists, thus calls to IE by any program that wishes to bypass the new default browser will fail. This is only one of several thousand tweaks to Win 7 needed to make it user-friendly to yours truly.
Mozilla is very open about what is collected, and all of it can be turned off. We'd really rather you not lock in insecure versions; until you've worked on a browser, you won't believe how active and pervasive the attacks are. As a developer, I'll also say that the internal process for adding any additional collection is pretty heavyweight. Even if you're just collecting the distribution of garbage collection time slices, you need to go through a privacy data review.
Mozilla spells out its data collection policies at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/ (first DDG hit for "mozilla privacy", which is how I found it). If something there is unclear, or you have reason to believe we're a bunch of scheming liars and you have the receipts to prove it, please let me know.
Firefox Suggest is a calculated tradeoff to provide more functionality in exchange for sending more data, but again it's totally configurable if you disagree with the tradeoff.
I honestly don't know what you're going on about with "Mozilla's comments on v94's webpage", so I can't respond to that.
I will assert that Mozilla is very much not going the way of the rest of the industry, and we are in fact being very conscious to carve out a different path. Which isn't easy. But if you have the degree of distrust conveyed by your message, then please don't use Firefox. It's not doing you or us any favors.
It's fine to call out specific problems and gaps though. Feedback is good, and anyone interested enough to seriously look at this is welcome to get involved with the Mozilla project and contribute to improving this stuff.
To respond adequately to your post would require me to start detailing what I (and many others) reckon what's wrong with Firefox (and similarly so with Thunderbird). Clearly that's not very practical here, as to do so we'd be bogged down in detail and the key points of the argument would be lost.
That said and not wanting to let anyone assume I'm avoiding your points, I've divided the key objections into the following groups.
1. Features that by their intrinsic nature should be in both Firefox and Thunderbird but which are missing. These are left to be picked by add-on developers who eventually give up after Mozilla broke the compatibility model once too often. Thus a useful feature we'd gotten used to via an add-on literally disappeared with an upgrade (more about this in point 2.)
2. The single biggest fiasco with Firefox from a user's perspective is Mozilla's perennial breaking of its add-ons. Not only is this disrespectful to third-party developers who develop them, and it often it turns them off from doing further development work, but also it infuriates users whenever their add-ons no longer work.
In essence, to them an upgrade is actually a downgrade in terms of user ergonomics. Whilst Mozilla may have done this for noble reasons such as improved security it's of very little concern to the the average user (myself included) whose facility no longer works. As far as he/she is concerned, Mozilla has fucked up yet again - I'm not exaggerating here, it's been a constant theme for Mozilla to blatantly ignore compatibility from the early 2000s until today. Just go to Mozilla's add-ons site and check the huge number of incompatibility issues one finds even with the items that are still listed (many are not).
For the record, I'll mention one add-on that should have been in the core program that was fixed by an add-on which was later busted by a 'retrograde' Mozilla 'upgrade' and that was Lazarus, it very usefully allowed undos in dialogue boxes etc. which often get lost for nefarious reasons after one has typed much text. If just about every text editor and wordprocessor has multiple levels of undo then why doesn't Firefox?
Whilst there may be many reasonable excuses for why Mozilla acted the way it did, the user isn't interested in hearing any of them - all he/she knows is that a useful feature that once worked now doesn't and Mozilla's actions are the reason. Many of us remember those failures and it's why so many of us go to inordinate lengths to nuke automatic updates, as they're likely to backfire just when we least expect it (inconviently in the middle of an important job etc.).
(The picture that such actions (and there's been many of them) engender in many of us users is that Mozilla programers primarily program out of self-interest rather than that of users' actual needs. Naturally, you programmers prefer simpler, cleaner code that doesn't support legacy features - similarly, it seems none of you are prepared to do the extra yard work - the extra coding - need to keep old-API add-ons safe. I know, it's boring shit, and no one will do so willingly, they have to be compelled to do so, and no one in authority at Mozilla has made that call (and that alone speaks a great deal about the ethos/culture at Mozilla).
Again, just get it into your heads that no one other than you Mozilla programmers care a damn about the reasons why you nuked XUL/NPAPI as laudable as you at Mozilla deem nuking them to be. Morever, many of us aren't interested in DRM or pandering to the tech giants. Right, include new features if you have to but at least provide us users with the option to let us turn them off. For instance, the first of these annoyances was the removal of the switch to turn JavaScript off. Right, default it to 'on' for the majority who wish to use it but it's down outright authoritarian programming to insist that you programers know best - especially when you haven't a clue about user ergonomics or what actually annoys users (and I've a damned good idea having run an IT department for years only to find myself continually falling foul and being blamed and held responsible by users for your programming changes.
Why you programers want to be on such a power kick is something that only psychologists can figure out if that's at all possible. Of course, it's not only Mozilla programmers here, Microsoft's are possibly the worst. It's the sheer arrogance that you programners diaplay when you think you know what's best for users when you often don't have a clue which is so annoying (I'm not aiming specifically at Mozilla programmers here, rather that inflated ego is characteristic of breed. BTW, I've done a considerable amount of programming in my time but I don't consider myself a professional programer.)
3. Similarly, instead of fixing boring bugs such as those longstanding ones in the printer routine and the overall outdatedness of the printer routine per se, not to mention that other first-class annoyance - the failure of text selected by the mouse to be copied from the context menu thus requiring a full highlight followed by CTRL-C then CTRL-V to actually work - you Mozilla programers simply ignore them year after year. Right, fixing bugs is boring, but adding new features obviosly isn't - even if many users deem them unnecessary or of secondary importance to rectifying the more utilitarian features of the program. I mention Australis here. As it's clear it annoyed the hell out of many users, thus it's fitting to ask why Mozilla didn't include an optional fallback to the older UI? Right, I've already answered that point.
4. If Mozilla's programmers genuinely claim they're trying to do the right thing by users then it's almost impossible to conclude that they actually understand users - or what features they actually want from a browser. Yes, it's a restatement of what I've already said, but it has to be true otherwise Firefox's usage ratings wouldn't be nosediving off the graph. An adjunct to that is that Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why its takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate. Moreover, you would have fewer users like me upping critical hyperbole out of sheer frustration.
Finally, likewise, I don't understand why you can't see my reasoning for why the Firefox 94 webpage contains said info you mentioned. I'll get the quote and post it here when I've a moment.
Again, what I've said hurts and I know it. Please understand it's no vendetta and it hurts me to be so negative (especially when there's so much negativity about these days); and it also hurts to see the only essentially independent browser going down the gurgler when it ought not to be. You should spare a thought for people like me who insist that the corporate browser should be Firefox only to find us between a rock and a hard place when it all goes belly-up for the many reasons mentioned. Defending Firefox against Chrome is no easy task these days.
Incidentally, the problem occurred when I was editing the text and I responded too quickly to a page that wasn't appearing to update. The server responded with a one-line message to the effect that it hadn't uppated the text and whatever I did next somehow created a duplicate.
To respond adequately to your post would require me to start detailing what I (and many others) reckon what's wrong with Firefox (and similarly so with Thunderbird). Clearly that's not very practical here, as to do so we'd be bogged down in detail and the key points of the argument would be lost.
That said and not wanting to let anyone assume I'm avoiding your points, I've divided an overview of the key objections into the following groups.
1. Features that by their intrinsic nature should be in both Firefox and Thunderbird but which are missing. These are left to be picked by add-on developers who eventually give up after Mozilla breaks the compatibility model once too often. Thus a useful feature we'd gotten used to via an add-on literally disappears with an upgrade (more about this in point 2.)
2. The single biggest fiasco with Firefox from a user's perspective is Mozilla's perennial breaking of its add-ons. Not only is this disrespectful to third-party developers who develop them, and it often turns them off from doing further development work, but also it infuriates users whenever their add-ons no longer work.
In essence, when an add-on no longer works after an upgrade, users consider such an upgrade as actually a downgrade in terms of performance and user ergonomics. Whilst Mozilla may have done this for noble reasons such as improved security it's of very little concern or comfort to the average user (myself included) whose facility no longer works. As far as he/she is concerned, Mozilla has fucked up yet again - and I'm not exaggerating here, it's been a constant theme for Mozilla to blatantly ignore compatibility from the early 2000s until today. Just go to Mozilla's add-ons site and check the huge number of incompatibility issues one finds even with the items that are still listed (many are not).
For the record, I'll mention just one add-on that should have been in the core program that was fixed by an add-on which was later busted by a 'retrograde' Mozilla 'upgrade' and that was Lazarus, it very usefully allowed undos in dialogue boxes etc. which often get lost for nefarious reasons after one has typed much text. If just about every text editor and wordprocessor has multiple levels of undo then why doesn't Firefox?
[Edit, Firefox's not alone here, I just lost many edits whilst editing typos in this post from my mobile. Had undo worked then there'd had been no problem. Thus it's a problem with many browsers. No, I'm not using Firefox or Chrome here.]
As stated, whilst there may be many reasonable excuses for why Mozilla acted the way it did, the user isn't interested in hearing any of them - all he/she knows is that a useful feature that once worked now doesn't and Mozilla's actions are the reason. Many of us remember those failures and it's why so many of us go to inordinate lengths to nuke automatic updates, as they're likely to backfire just when we least expect it (inconviently in the middle of an important job etc.).
The picture that such actions (and there's been many of them) engender in many of us users is that Mozilla programers primarily program out of self-interest rather than that of users' actual needs. Naturally, you programmers prefer simpler, cleaner code that doesn't support legacy features - similarly, it seems none of you are prepared to do the extra yard work - the extra coding - need to keep old-API add-ons safe. I know, it's boring shit, and no one will do so willingly, they have to be compelled to do so, and no one in authority at Mozilla has made that call (and that alone speaks a great deal about the ethos/culture at Mozilla).
Again, just get it into your heads that no one other than you Mozilla programmers care a damn about the reasons why you nuked XUL/NPAPI as laudable as you at Mozilla deem their nuking to be. Morever, many of us aren't interested in DRM or pandering to the tech giants. Include new features if you must but at least provide us users with the option to let us turn them off.
As you've seen with Firefox, sticking to some moral highgound, or overdoing security above all else - not to mention overly pandering to new web standards forced on us by the new owners of the Internet, Google Facebook et all, has its heavy penalties. Provide these features by all means but stop taking full responsibility for a user's security. If he/she wants to deliberately downgrade his/her security from the default then so be it, you've no right or ultimate authority to dictate that. Moreover, if you want to pander to the security mob, then I'd again point to the fact that such righteousness has cost Mozilla dearly in market share.
For instance, the first of these forced annoyances was the removal of the switch to turn JavaScript off. Right, default it to 'on' for the majority who wish to use it but it's down outright authoritarian programming to insist that you programers know best - especially when you seemingly haven't a clue about user ergonomics or what actually annoys users (and I've a damned good idea having run an IT department for years only to find myself continually falling foul of users who blame me and or my staff as they hold us directly responsible for your 'irresponsible' programming changes).
Why you programers want to be on such a power kick is something that only psychologists can figure out if that's at all possible. Of course, it's not only Mozilla programmers here, Microsoft's are possibly the worst. It's the sheer arrogance that you programners display when you think you know what's best for users when you often don't have a clue which is so annoying (I'm not aiming specifically at Mozilla programmers here, rather that inflated ego is characteristic of breed). BTW, I've done a considerable amount of programming in my time but I don't consider myself a professional programer.
3. Similarly, instead of fixing boring bugs such as those longstanding ones in the printer routine and the overall outdatedness of the printer routine per se, not to mention that other first-class annoyance - the failure of text selected by the mouse to be copied from the context menu thus it requires a full highlight followed by CTRL-C then CTRL-V to actually work - you Mozilla programers simply ignore them year after year. Right, fixing bugs is boring, but adding new features obviosly isn't - even if many users deem them unnecessary or of secondary importance to rectifying problems with the more utilitarian features of the program. I mention Australis here. As it's clear it annoyed the hell out of many users, thus it's fitting to ask why Mozilla didn't include an optional fallback to the older UI. Right, I've already answered that point.
4. If Mozilla's programmers genuinely claim they're trying to do the right thing by users then it's almost impossible to conclude that they actually understand users - or what features users actually want from a browser. (Who do you ask and why doesn't Mozilla respond to the many thousands of complaints just like mine?) Yes, it's a restatement of what I've already said, but it has to be true or otherwise Firefox's usage ratings wouldn't be nosediving off the graph. An adjunct to that is that Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why its takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate. Moreover, you would have fewer users like me upping hyperbole to critical levels out of sheer frustration.
Finally, likewise, I don't understand why you can't see my reasoning for why the Firefox 94 webpage contains said info you mentioned. I'll get the quote and post it here when I've a moment.
Again, what I've said hurts and I know it. Please understand it's no vendetta and it hurts me to be so negative (especially when there's so much negativity about these days); and it also hurts to see the only essentially independent browser going down the gurgler when it ought not to be. You should spare a thought for people like me who insist that the corporate browser should be Firefox only to find us between a rock and a hard place when it all goes belly-up for the many reasons mentioned. Defending Firefox against Chrome is no easy task these days.
Ironically, constant add-on breakage is exactly why we broke all the addons. The situation really was as bad as you describe; every release broke large numbers of addons because the addon architectural was far too invasive. It was unsustainable. Bug fixes, security fixes, and new features all required changes that broke addons.
That doesn't happen anymore. (Or at least, it is now rare instead of ridiculously common.) Addons are much more limited, they break very rarely, and we have been able to make some changes necessary for some survival-threatening shortcomings (eg Spectre vulnerabilities that the competitors do not have). I miss Lazarus too.
We have not done as good a job as we liked at implementing the new extension model. The massive layoffs made that much harder.
Arguing over what users want is a losing proposition. I know I've often been surprised (and disappointed) by the data. And I freely admit that there are some major deficiencies still present. Often, though, I find that results are different in different environments. The context menu thing works here, for example. Please file a bug if there isn't already one. I have other cut & paste bugs that irritate the hell out of me, though, so I'm not surprised by another one.
The printer stuff was completely ignored and abandoned for a very, very long time. It has dramatically improved in the last few versions.
Supporting older UX is always a hard one. I feel it too, I generally don't see the point in most changes, but I'm not going to second-guess the people who say that UX refreshes make more people happy than sad. And maintenance of past stuff has a surprisingly high cost that can't be waved away as devs being lazy. Especially in the face of mass layoffs.
> ...Mozilla never fully levels with its users concerning the real reasons for why it takes certain actions - that is other than to dress up changes with PR-speak and spin. If Mozilla's leveled with users more honesty then users would likely reciprocate.
I tend to agree. I don't think it's as bad as you say, but I do think it's an area of weakness.
----
Anyway, not meant to be a comprehensive answer. I don't think you're completely wrong about all this, but it does look a lot different from the inside.
The maintenance service is used to prevent the need for UAC prompts during upgrades. That's it. No background update functionality.
I'm just curious because as much as I disagree with many of Mozilla decisions, I still can't honestly compare it to other browser vendors like Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
I'll probably just find some fork of Firefox or a Chromium based browser and just make-do.
People often confuse this feature with the Mozilla Maintenance Service, the latter has shipped with Firefox for more than a decade and is used to avoid UAC prompts during updates.
(I used to work at Mozilla and at one point also worked on the team that owns install/update.)
The end game, I assume, is that updates eventually come through the store. But that effectively prevent updates unless they agree to it.
If I wanted an auto-updating key-logging tool on my systems, I'd have sold my soul to Chrome already.
I had upgraded before seeing this ... In preferences, you have the following options:
> Allow Firefox to:
> --------------------------------------------------------
> [x] Automatically install updates (recommended)
> [ ] Check for updates but let you choose to install them
> This setting will apply to all Windows accounts and Firefox profiles using this installation of Firefox.
> --------------------------------------------------------
> [x] Use a background service to install updates
How about "don't ping home"?
For some double-speak, read the Manifesto: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/manifesto/
In a sense, they are very open about their goals, if you have read the classics by Kafka, Orwell, and Bradbury.
Unfortunately, taking things completely out of context and editorializing the facts is par for the course. Discourse is getting very disingenuous.
> Firefox will send Mozilla search queries (what you are typing into the address bar), and city-level location (what's nearby and relevant, determined from your IP address). Firefox also informs the service if you click on a provided suggestion.
Combine this with "studies" which were never made public, extra avenues of telemetry that one finds out about waaaayyy after the fact etc, the last couple of years have seen Firefox become increasingly hostile to users.
[1]: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/navigate-web-faster-fir...
I don't like that level of telemetry, and I also dislike the "studies" and some of the other things they've pulled, but glibly referring to search suggestions as "key-logging" is disingenuous at best. It seems to imply that there's some nefarious logging happening that people aren't familiar with and can't disable.
Most regular users think you search for something on Google, it is between them and Google. This "feature" started sending one's incomplete queries to Mozilla as well. Every time user presses a key, search suggestions update, meaning every key user presses is sent to Mozilla before the search is even executed on Google.
Upon upgrade, users where not asked "We would like to see every key you press while typing anything in the search bar. Do you give us permission?"
> glibly referring to search suggestions as "key-logging"
Yeah, I think I am going to keep glibly referring to sending every key-stroke to Mozilla while the user is constructing a search query or looking for a bookmark or a page in their browser history as "key-logging."
But what is this accusation of key-logging now? Where did that come from?
I'm not sure you are aware that this feature is toggled in Firefox's settings. You can get a glimpse of the settings panel in the following link:
https://www.ghacks.net/2021/11/02/firefox-94-0-release-here-...