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How is this any different from a standard Firefox install with telemetry turned off

It also comes preconfigured with a lot of good settings for privacy, like resist fingerprinting, 3rd party cookie stuff, etc...

I know you can turn this stuff on manually but it's convenient to have a fork that does it for you and turns off Mozilla's telemetry completely

Hopefully it's a lot different. If you proxy Firefox you'll see that even with everything turned off that you possibly can through the UI, Firefox phones home many times, especially during launch and exit.

It would be nice to back that up a bit more. I'm genuinely curious.

For what it's worth, some of the startup checks are to see whether the user is on a public wifi with a captive portal, and talk to a Mozilla service rather than Google. Other checks are for upgrades, or Firefox Sync, if enabled.

There’s a great macOS app called Charles Proxy that you can use to inspect this sort of thing which is a little quicker to get going and use than the CLI equivalent (mitmproxy I think it’s called).

I would be really surprised if the Firefox developers refused a patch adding a new about:config setting for whatever you're talking about.

When they get around to it in ten years.

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