Why is this being hated on? It's a revenue model for them to make the competitive browser we want...
Having these large branded cosmetic additions to firefox is kinda a genius non-intrusive or at least less intrusive way to do advertisements.
Having these large branded cosmetic additions to firefox is kinda a genius non-intrusive or at least less intrusive way to do advertisements.
They can't open their mouths without talking about how much they care about privacy, but at the same time making it nearly impossible to opt out of their telemetry. For Mozilla, invasion of privacy only appears to be bad when other people are doing it.
This just comes off as sanctimonious and hypocritical.
What's really frustrating is that they absolutely could do good. If they actually managed to live up to even half their words, they'd be amazing. But for some reason, they just... don't.
It is one checkbox in the settings. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/share-data-mozilla-help...
Two if you don't want to be put into studies - I don't think Origin Trials in Chrome can be opted out of at all (if you know how, it'd be nice to tell us).
Be sure to read the top comment.
They are also doing this bullshit, which isn't even a little bit OK: https://mozilla.github.io/normandy/index.html
> Two if you don't want to be put into studies - I don't think Origin Trials in Chrome can be opted out of at all (if you know how, it'd be nice to tell us).
What Chrome does is completely irrelevant. I don't want a browser that is less bad than Chrome, I want one that is good.
Personally, I think it is totally fair to open a bug or submit an idea revisiting whether this is necessary anymore. I would assume that they now have a pretty good idea of what the opt out rate is in the wild.
If you file a bug, please post it, because I'd be curious to follow what happens afterwards.
Pretty much every single violation of privacy can be rationalized with someone feeling like they need the data for some reason or another. Mozilla does not get special dispensation to spy on their users.
Agreed. Besides telemetry, merely achieving privacy when it comes to browsing requires manually turning up the tracking protection level to the strictest and installing a third-party add-on: uBlock Origin.
This gives a false sense of security to less tech-savvy users who (reasonably) believe that they'll actually have privacy by installing a privacy-focused browser from a company that claims to be on their side in all their marketing.
Firefox became far more successful than Opera, at least outside the embedded market.
Maybe the adware browser model can make a comeback and be super-successful this time because things have changed, but it didn't work very well the first time.
("But these aren't ads, they're optional themes" true, but you wanna bet they won't advertise it with one or more pop-ups and/or focus-stealing-to-new-advertising-tab thingies, like they do with everything else? Which is funny because one of their big selling points originally was automatically blocking pop-up ads)
It was never really smaller than the mozilla suite, they just simplified the UI. This is not intended as an insult, it was exactly what was needed and worked out really well for everybody, it's just amazing how much the reality got lost.
In particular, Opera while going the opposite way with their "everything and the kitchen sink" interface for the power user market were legendary for small, fast and nimble code, which is how they ended up running on the Wii and Nintendo DS around this time.
I'd be very suprised if they weren't always a smaller download, even with bitorrent, email, ftp clients and whatever other crazy nonsense they had built in.
I'm going to check though, just in case it's me that's mistaken.
Pheonix 0.1 was double the size of the Opera download at the time.
You're probably[1 EDIT] right that I'm mis-remembering Opera's download size. I recall it feeling heavier in use, but that was probably something to do with the feel of its particular (non-native) UI, and maybe the extra system resource strain from loading and displaying banner ads for the ad-supported version (there were still some really weak computers in wide use in 2002).
[1] I only wrote "probably", originally, because I didn't bother to verify it—not because I don't believe you on that point. I didn't express that very well.