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Comment by lysergia | Hacker News Reader

Great! Now:

Stop tracking people with telemetry. You don’t need to know how many users you have. People strip FF of telemetry anyways. Look at LibreWolf and learn.

Clean up the FF addons repository. So many addons are plain malware and invading peoples privacy surreptitiously.

Get rid of Pocket. Nobody uses it and it was forced on users.

Stop piggybacking on handouts from Google. There are other ways to source revenue. Make FF donationware if you must. I would happily send you £5.00 per month if it means I and others can continue to use FF.

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> Get rid of Pocket. Nobody uses it and it was forced on users.

I use it daily..

So go to the website and use it. Many of us simply find it as a way for more propaganda to be fed to us unasked-for when we open up a new tab (at least, until we remember to turn it off).

In fact internally it's still packaged as an add-on that is installed on first run. Unbundling it would be super easy.

The product belongs to Mozilla, so I don't see why they shouldn't integrate it.

as with many things though it should be consent based and opt in; they can have a big button "add pocket to your firefox" and those who want it can opt in and everyone else won't have to go through the rigamarole of finding all the settings (strewn about in various locations including about:config) to disable it

That sounds far too civil and reasonable.

Because it bloats up the browser.

That said I find the articles they recommend interesting (and to steal my time ...).

>Stop tracking people with telemetry. You don’t need to know how many users you have.

Uhhh... what? If I was in Mozilla's shoes I would 100% want to know how many users I have.

>People strip FF of telemetry anyways. Look at LibreWolf and learn.

Some people do this. Not everyone does it.

> If I was in Mozilla's shoes I would 100% want to know how many users I have.

Which they can trivially extract from the number of hits to the auto-update version checker endpoint.

That's enough. You don't need to track every single mouse-click, visited site, or anything else.

> You don't need to track every single mouse-click, visited site, or anything else. They don't track mouse clicks or visited sites. You can see everything collected by going to about:telemetry

I do think they should set up donations directly to Firefox development and support, but I disagree on the telemetry and Pocket. Telemetry is useful for improving the product and people like pocket.

> Telemetry is useful for improving the product

Great, make it opt-in then. People have various legitimate reasons to decide for themselves whether they want to enable it or not. Keep in mind that under the GDPR it must be absolutely opt-in and the current implementation is in breach.

> people like pocket

Just like people like uBlock Origin (and I'd argue a lot more people like uBO than Pocket) and yet it isn't embedded in the browser for some reason (despite being permissively licensed and actually doing something to protect privacy).

Telemetry has been proven time and time again to be useless for adding improvements _users actually want_. If you want feedback, ask for it, don't secretly observe your users from a distance.

> Telemetry is useful

And it should be off by default, not opt-out.

> Make FF donationware if you must

How are they going to pay the CEO then? That alone is worth millions in salary every year.

I use pocket, so I’d like it to stay.

It can become an add-on which is what it is internally anyway (the browser downloads it upon first run, it's not even included in the browser build itself).

I use a lot of plugins. Should they all be mandatory?

I like that extension that replaces "cloud" with "butt", I think it should be bundled :-)

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