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Comment by tomxor | Hacker News Reader

> Why is Firefox losing marketshare

Can we validate that it is in fact losing market share first?

It's possible there are other factors such as the increased privacy capabilities and integrated tracker blocking and tendency for Firefox users to value and use these features and plugins, or even useragent string spoofing... I do the later so I look like a chrome/windows user because some sites will block features from Firefox for no reason (and also it's nice to be less trivially uniquely identifiable).

Where are the stats you are using and how are they collected?

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Those are all valid points, but Mozilla's own telemetry shows their userbase shrinking.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

many users turn off that telemetry, including me.

It's an interesting question if the percentage of users with telemetry disabled has increased a meaningful amount over time.

Mozilla has actually done some work to measure users with telemetry disabled; see the "telemetry coverage" section of https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri...

I'm not sure how frequently they've done this or if any of the data has been made public.

> if the percentage of users with telemetry disabled has increased a meaningful amount over time.

Yes, this was my main thought... It's possible what is being measured is the increased sensitivity of FireFox users to privacy issues, and the increased capabilities Firefox offers to it's users being used, including the option to disable telemetry.

>Mozilla has actually done some work to measure users with telemetry disabled;

That's kinda funny :D it's a meta telemetry telemetry... although as they mention it contains basically no info beyond the fact that telemetry was disabled and is only run on a small sample.

I suppose the only other way would be to attempt to count all the downloads of binary packages through all the Linux repo mirrors, flatpak, snap etc and then finally windows and mac in-browser downloads... which sounds like a nightmare so I can see why no-telemetry telemetry would be attractive.

> Mozilla has actually done some work to measure users with telemetry disabled; see the "telemetry coverage" section of https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri...

The fuck are they thinking. Disabling telemetry means not sending telemetry. NO. EXCUSES.

It's basically a `if (random() > threshold) POST cookie-less-origin/telemetry-{{ telemetry_enabled() ? "enabled" : "disabled"}}`.

I don't consider this telemetry. It does not keep any data on you, track you over time, or even fingerprint you.

I think this is a great way to get an approximate usage stat, while preserving privacy, respecting the no-telemetry choice, and keeping network overhead ridiculously low.

> cookie-less-origin

Irrelevant, tracking does not need cookies.

> I don't consider this telemetry.

I do and I specifically configured my browser not to send telemetry. Any kind.

> It does not keep any data on you, track you over time, or even fingerprint you.

You can't know that. But if there is a concrete privacy issue is also irrelevant. There is a) a trust issue and b) a disregard of my wishes issue, which only reinforces (a).

> I think this is a great way to get an approximate usage stat

It doesn't matter how great this is for its intended purpose, that does not make it right.

> keeping network overhead ridiculously low

0 network connections outside of what I browse is what I asked for, "any" is ridiculously high compared to that.

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