Author of Mozilla telemetry here. You can accomplish this with official firefox by blacklisting incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org domain, per https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/search?q=telemetry.moz...
How can you tell?
>A journaling feature has been added for QA purposes.
What exactly does that mean?
point your url bar to about:telemetry
It shows you all the data that has been gathered. (Though IIRC it might still show stuff even when you've disabled telemetry -- in that case the data is being aggregated locally but not sent.)
Go to https://telemetry.mozilla.org
To look at the data on the server side. There are more sophisticated ways of querying it, but obviously not everybody can just be handed access to run arbitrary analysis code.
Probe dictionaries:
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...
https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone...
How you probably think it works in Firefox and how it actually works in Firefox are two different things, by the way:
https://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/posts/how-safe-browsing-works-...
It's not this convoluted. Give people their privacy.
I argued with someone about how we shouldn’t expect privacy with a cell phone, I don’t see how a 24/7 location tracking device that reads data telemetry (even if you use a custom privacy rom you connect to the towers and send telemetry) can ever be seen as private. PCs are usually compromised with Intel ME or AMD ST (unless you have a specially modded one or use old government contracted ones with them disabled).
It's really apparent when I socks proxy into a remote site (via limited 2G) to view a few kB worth of HTML admin page and firefox starts autoupdating a bunch of remote resources.
Browsers know much more. Most channels are encrypted nowadays so ISP doesn't know what you talk about on internets.
I just switched the Librewolf, and installed the plugin there. It's working as expected, and I won't be forced (or incessantly nagged) to update the browser as I was with Firefox.
Thank you for your work on a great browser, but if you have any pull at Mozilla please tell them they're losing core users for good with these forced, unannounced, irrevocable changes to how users work in a browser.
That said, on Android, I don't see a single telemetry.mozilla.org entry in my DNS query logs.
Our primary objective is anti-censorship, and so, we make it simple for folks to deploy their own DoH (which means all our code is open source). Today, the serverless DoH stub resolver deploys to cloudflare workers but we plan to support deno.com/deploy and fly.io soon (already have it working in our development branches but the incompatibility between node and deno is causing a bit of pain to merge with mainline). RethinkDNS is the reference serverless DoH deployment, if you will.
We support DNS-based content-blocking too (out of sheer need for it from our users) but believe the right avenue to block content is either in-app where possible (like uBlockOrigin in Firefox) or at the IP-layer (not DNS), and hence we also build a Firewall (due to limited time, the RethinkDNS + Firewall app is Android-only, for the time being [1]).
That said, we do plan to achieve parity with NextDNS, but that's going to happen over a period of time since our team of 3 is stretched thin between building the firewall (too much complexity!) and the dns (too much work!).
Should written feedback overrule a bigger data set?
Firefox doesn't block ads because they're funded by Google and they have ads in their own browser. Nobody likes ads. Especially not in the browser. This contributes to the decline. Firefox doesn't advertise with security snake oil, and they beg for money a lot, which is the exact opposite of the model proposed by the only browser that's rapidly shot up in market share in the last decade rather than roughly stagnating.
You can use nothing but positive data-driven results to drive yourself out of existence, and it's rather easy. Direct, human feedback is absolutely essential.
If it isn't customizable by the type of users who care about customization, then what is the reason to use Firefox instead of what ships with your OS or Chrome. Why would "typical users" have chosen Firefox in the first place without some vocal user suggesting it?
I still use Firefox for everything, I'm just sad that the lack of inspiration in the project means that it might not be a viable option in a few years. Maybe they're aiming for making 98% of users happy, and matching 98% of the features of other browsers, but it needs to have some reason to exist. Usability testing without innovation is that different from p-hacking without hypotheses in science.
Anyway, compact density was a non-default option, so it's difficult to understand why the option had to be deprecated. Compare that to MacOS. I didn't upgrade to Big Sur until Apple restored the option `NSWindowShouldDragOnGesture`, which allows you to drag a window from any pixel when you hold down control-option-command. Out of a billion users, I'd be surprised if more than 5,000 users care about this feature. (ie >99.9995% probably don't care) I only use the feature in combination with Karabiner Elements to change the command and Steermouse to recognize mouse button chords, but I invoke the command every couple minutes. Nevertheless it was restored, and it never disappeared in Monterey. Is it the budget alone that allows Apple to be simultaneously opinionated in their UI design and user accommodating, or is it completely different attitudes about users?
Ignoring the people who actually take the time to communicate problems in favor of interpreted telemetry is exactly why Firefox is losing. Taking direction from technical users, or so-called power users, can give the application improvements in nuanced and technical uses. Taking direction from anonymous "averages" makes development a race to the bottom.
Firefox developments over the last couple years feels like what would happen if you put grandma in charge of trying to make things better. To put it bluntly, fuck grandma, she doesn't know what the hell she's doing anyway. Firefox used to be a Lamborghini, it doesn't need training wheels and balloon bumpers. Lean into technical excellence and drop the obsessive ui/ux nonsense.
Once it was clear that Chrome was destined to cater to the masses, Firefox should have done a hard pivot with an emphasis on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience. The best time to do this was a few years back when all of this was becoming obvious, but now with massive popular distrust of large tech companies like Facebook and Google making daily news, the second best time is now.
There's a reason I run Linux and BSD on every computing device I own, instead of Windows or Mac. It's not because it's easier to use (they are not), it is not because it has more bells and whistles (they do not). It's because at the end of the day, _I_ am the one in control of my computers, not some product manager who needs bullet points on his or her annual review.
There is no universe in which Firefox is going to successfully compete against Google at their own game, especially when Google is _still_ the majority source of their funding. I have no evidence for or against this, but my greatest fear is that the people at Mozilla who were passionate about the same things that I am passionate about have left out of frustration and the only ones left are there for the lifestyle and hipsterness of "working in tech" at a non-profit in a trendy city.
To illustrate what I mean here, if you want a fork with an emphasis on privacy you can just use LibreWolf. It is the entire thread we are responding to, the thing you want exists right now. But I don't see people exactly flocking to use that, your comment seems to not even acknowledge that it exists!
Why do you believe that catering to the masses implies not focusing on privacy and putting the user in control of their browsing experience?
And it's not like Firefox has no Nightly or Beta branch to test the waters before making a significant change. For example, during the prerelease phase of the so-called Proton UI, there was no shortage of clear feedback about it. A lot of it was legitimate criticism about accessibility (harder to distinguish inactive horizontal tabs because the separators were removed; part of the new palette did not have enough contrast; etc.) and usability (e.g. in cases of low screen estate, some menus were suddenly so huge that they'd not fit within the height of the screen).
Mozilla is slowly fixing some of these issues, which is a good sign IMO, but also sticking to some other "deliberate design decisions" that still remain controversial. I largely do not believe in design-by-committee, by the way. However, I believe that all valid feedback should be evaluated and taken into consideration if it's critical.
Look at the speedrunning community for example: sometimes it’s not just a tiny group, but a single person that sees something that the devs did not, and that can lead to fixing “wtf” bugs for everyone else.