Firefox got faster for real users in 2023
hacks.mozilla.org
hacks.mozilla.org
But I have some itching concerns about that methodology with heavy anonymisation and stuff there:
Couldn't it be that the web itself got faster, and folks have better hardware?
I mean, yes, generally these sloppy script kiddies with bloated frameworks produce less and less effective code … but I can imagine, that when some heavily visited page deploys a new better optimized and leaner version (I assume such things happen in reality, don't they?), there is no way to tell it apart from telemetry data telling that everything got slightly faster on average. Or with people getting better hardware, or with OS and driver updates, etc.
However the data presented in this post shows obvious step changes in performance that correlate with browser version rollout. It would be disingenuous not to attribute this to a concerted effort on performance improvements from the Firefox team.
That would certainly be overly optimistic.
Something so that more megahertz/cores doesn’t throw off the number.
Whatever the reason, it is nice to see it improving. I think it would be interesting to also see a median figure in addition to a 95% figure.
I hadn’t noticed until I read this, but I think that feeling has gone away recently and I had already stopped thinking about switching.
[1] Because Slack still doesn't support WebRTC on Firefox after 8 years…
Historically, software has continued to behave like a gas, expanding to fill space and consume resources. The resources generally do not belong to the software authors.
Software isn't eating the world, it's eating your computer's resources and the bandwidth you pay for every month.
And not just a focus on Tech but also focus on product. i.e Firefox.
You could have them focus on Tech and they spend all their resources on Firefox OS.
Especially given that it's now become the third largest mobile OS with over 100 million active users worldwide.
For instance, FirefoxOS seems to have been a failure, but most longshots are a failure, and if you scrimp on long shots then you end up like Microsoft, realizing that some kids these days don't even have a laptop and their phone sure as hell isn't running Windows. So I'm fine with more FirefoxOS-like projects.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/StatCoun...
Firefox is continues to bleed users despite of (or because of) UI reshuffling.
I am with you on this one, not only that but I am actually satisfied with the switch I did years ago.
Of course it's impossible to find anything anywhere about this due to search engine spam
Was fine for years until 118 and is rare enough to not be able to reliably reproduce it (and thus do things like disabling extensions, running the pain of a new profile, etc), so I guess I have to live with it, as life's too short.
I'll have to pay attention now to if it's happening on all my machines. it for sure happened on a Windows 10 machine
So there's that ...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Desktop_notifications#Usage...
If our crash reporter is enabled, you can also just kill the parent process with `SIGABRT`, this will produce an entry in `about:crashes` that you can look up on restart, and submit. This will then give a link to our crash reporting front-end.
If you have `gdb` and `debuginfod` on your distro, and you're using your distro's Firefox, attach `gdb` to the parent process of Firefox, let it download symbols, and do `thread all apply bt`, this will dump the stacks of all the threads of your parent process.
If you're using one of our Firefox builds, you can use https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/toolkit/crashreporte..., that will integrate with our own symbol servers. Depending on your distro this might or might not work on your distro's Firefox (some distros submit their symbols to our infra to help diagnosing crashes).
Once you have some info about the crash, you can open a ticket on your distro bug tracker, or https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Core to reach us directly, attaching the stacks, Firefox version, crash report, about:support, or anything else that you think is relevant.
Oftentimes, those freezes (on Linux) are caused by a bug between Firefox and the desktop environment, or by graphics drivers, that kind of thing, and stacks allow narrowing down the issue greatly, sometimes it's just a package update or a configuration flip away!
Side question: what can be done on Windows in such a case?
(but yes, it probably is, even with 40GB of memory. I bet many things are designed on Linux with overcommit as an assumption)
I have since enabled the page file for other reasons - LLMs demand up to 50GB of memory sometimes, and my new desktop only has 16.
The change of machine is why I should probably try Firefox again to see if it behaves.
Overcommit is allocating virtual memory without any backing. Swap is allocating physical memory backed by disk.
Overcommit is useful in some cases, for example to preallocate a large heap without immediately making it all resident. Or to allocate 'guard' pages to fight buffer overflows. On Linux, overcommit is commonly assumed and as such disabling it tends to break some programs, as it's not out of the ordinary for something to allocate 100s of GBs of virtual memory.
Overcommit cannot be enabled without a swap file, whatsoever. This differs from Linux that can tend to have overcommit enabled without swap.
I still wouldn't be comfy letting Firefox fill it up, because no matter how large the page file is, your system will always crash when Firefox fills the entire thing. I do not know if my new computer will have this problem, though.
But as a user, I don't care (except that I don't have to worry about an OOM killer because an allocation will just fail). The only real difference is that application developers need to be careful with allocating memory without using it, unlike on Unix-likes.
Because software on Linux runs on the assumption of overcommit, you shouldn't disable it, even though the lack of overcommit on Windows is not problematic.
The advice used to be 1.5*physical ram for swap back in the days when I had 4MB of ram and 170MB HDD - well under 5% of disk space Doing that today would be 20% of my disk space which seemed excessive.
Perhaps I could create a 24G swap file as a ram drive, giving me 8G of ram and 24G of swap. Why would that be better than just 32G of ram and no swap? Is it better than 40G of ram and no swap?
Yep. This was a rule of thumb which I don't think still holds with current RAM capacities.
I don't have swap on my 32G laptop, not sure it's right I guess I could use a 2G-4G swap partition when running a few XWiki instances and a Java IDE as well as a browser with several dozens of tabs instead of having the IDE frequently OOM-killed.
Firefox on my laptop currently consumes almost 400GiB of virtual address space, while consuming "only" 458GiB of RSS. And that's not a bug, that's simply the browser making good use of the virtual memory system to provide significant advantages to all users on systems without overcommit disabled (which I'm guessing is 99.99% of people).
The difference in response you're seeing is simply because ta1243 is reporting a Firefox bug and you're reporting user error.
EDIT: Here's some further reading on some of the ways which Chrome's JavaScript engine (V8) uses virtual memory for security: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HSap8-J3HcrZvT7-5NsbYWcj...
Don't tell me Firefox needs 40GB of virtual memory to keep a tab open for longer than a couple weeks. Or that it's the JavaScript engine when closing all tabs or windows didn't free the memory, only restarting the entire browser did. It wasn't the extensions, either.
If Chromium works properly without leaking memory, and Firefox leaks memory and calls it "user error" to not have overcommit enabled, I'm going to use Chromium, simply because it actually respects my computer's resources.
Also, you're citing ways in which Chromium's V8 uses virtual memory, when V8 does not suffer from this problem. Clearly you can use virtual memory in that way without having a memory leak.
Also remember that Windows does not have unlimited overcommit like Linux does, because it has no OOM killer. So if Firefox were to use 400GiB of virtual memory, that would require the page file to take up the remainder of that.
I did have issues with my page file "automatically" growing to 64GiB with Firefox running, so maybe it literally does do this and it actually uses up hundreds of gigabytes of space on Windows machines. But that is not acceptable behavior from Firefox and it is definitely not user error to not want to give up that much space.
Edit: Spoke too soon. Just happened again while joining a GoogleMeet meeting, if that's relevant.
I've also been running into an annoying issue where hover menus will randomly stop working---it seems like the mouseout event is firing before the click event is handled.
But all in all not annoying enough to switch.
Was a user from the Phoenix/Firebird days with the "unzip it somewhere" fancy installation process, used it for almost 20 years, and then switched to a Chromium-based browser due to perceivable speed differences.
I wasn't running benchmarks to confirm my suspicions or that performing some action was x milliseconds slower in Firefox or anything. But when you're using something all day, every day including as part of your job, it is easy to get a feel for.
With these multiple reports recently of performance work, along with real-world metrics ... I'm thinking of sticking with it for a few days again. If I don't notice the difference, or it actually seems faster, I'll switch back.
I want to switch back, because we need to ensure there are alternate browser engines, and I don't want standards committees to turn into "this year, Google deems we shall be doing the following" sort of events.
Here is a reference for the userChrome.css to hide the default tabs. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23268077
user_pref("browser.aboutConfig.showWarning", "false"); // disable about:config warning
user_pref("browser.startup.page", 3); // restore previous session
user_pref("browser.ctrlTab.sortByRecentlyUsed", "true"); // cycles tabs in recently used order
user_pref("signon.rememberSignons", "false"); // dont ask to save passwords
user_pref("browser.search.suggest.enabled", "false"); // disable address bar suggestions
user_pref("toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets", "true"); // enable custom css
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
I context switch often, and am so much more productive because of this plugin.
https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...
a) need "Auto Tab Discard" which sends unused tabs in the background to sleep, not consuming resources.
b) enjoy I can still use CSS to hack the tab bar for e.g. three scrollable rows
The native vertical tabs in Edge are also pretty good. Not nearly as feature-rich, basically just vertical tabs with automatic unloading and tab groups; but in return it's incredibly stable and bug-free.
Of course, there's a difference between going faster by using more resources and by just taking less time.
Who cares about benchmarks?
I then switched over to Edge and it performed significantly faster, and was using less of the 4GB of RAM. I was surprised at how significant the difference was, but there was no denying it. Edge performs much better than other browsers on low-end PC's.
That said, I have a small nit. I would have liked to see how performance changed relative to the same time last year, to control for seasonal effects. Image 1 is showing changes on the scale of 1/100 of a second. I'm not an expert in the field, but when you'r looking at signal of that magnitude controlling for noise is more relevant.
EDIT: I should add, I am a satisfied user of FF.
Edit- also see https://wiki.mozilla.org/Areweyet
It looks to my naive eyes like the trajectories here are consistent and that the “signal” looks bigger than the variance. The measurements seen consistent with a bunch of smart engineers working to optimize for them during the time period they were measured.
At the same time you’re right: that big August improvement might well have something to do with Northern-hemisphere people switching to lighter vacation reading rather than just the Firefox 116 release happening to drop August 1. I’d share your interest in the longer timescale.
I'm impressed with Firefox and tried a fork called floorp. It has some useful additions and find it better than regular Firefox while still supporting sync and was using ungoogled chromium before.
https://github.com/Floorp-Projects/Floorp/releases
Unfortunately some websites still work better with chromium browsers in my experience. This is anecdotal but I also feel some negative fingerprinting from Google owned websites on Firefox, more memory leaks as well. It's only a matter of time before I change to Firefox (forced manifest V3) but I will stick with brave for now.
- using hardware accelerated video decoding is bizarre if the video uses VP9 (even disabling it or forcing AV1) it stutters from time to time;
- watching a video in the background and playing game at the same time, with hybrid graphics, freezes/hangs kWin, then, the video that was playing in the browser becomes green and everything that used either iGPU or dGPU starts to struggle and stutters a lot, forcing me to log in and out, i. e. restart my session manually;
The last one may be because of Nvidia (yes, my fault for having this card) prime offload in Wayland, but even so, I did not find any topic related to this, that has not otherwise been solved in bugzilla, and honestly I am kind of afraid to report this and be met with judging questions; I'd like to debug some more, but I don't have the patience.
These are the two ever lasting headaches that I have with Firefox. None of this bothers me enough to leave Firefox though.
Anyway, my congratulations to the team. Today, I have successfully converted 5 people to use Firefox.
I know it's hard to control for those things while maintaining anonymity and doing aggregate analysis, but this would be a much stronger argument controlling for at least some level of available compute.
(I exclusively use Firefox on all the platforms)
There's no reason to assume that what is brought up in a blog post is going to match what engineers are looking at. In this case, I'm a developer at Mozilla, and I would say that I agree that it's worthwhile to look at the 99th percentile as well. And the median (50th percentile). And other platforms. And segregate it by website, but we don't collect that, or by country, but although I think we might be collecting that we avoid correlating too many things before discarding the non-aggregate data. There are too many German users to worry about identifying one by knowing they're German, but there's aren't that many German users with >100 tabs running on Windows 7 on slower hardware, etc.
I wouldn't want to pile up any more data than necessary in a blog post, though. The point would get buried. Man Bites Dog Whose Litter Mate Once Skipped A Veterinary Visit Because Owner Was Out Of Town At A Wedding Between Two People Whose Names Start With D
(Yes, we do consider many different percentiles when making decisions. We kind of have to come up with arguments for what matters, given a change we made or are contemplating. Some things improve the 50th and regress the 95th, for example, and that's a useful clue. Telemetry tracks half a dozen different percentiles.)
I use Firefox because its fullscreen mode is far better than all the other browsers I've tried on Linux, but it does seem like it's clearly slower to perform and slower to be able to adopt new web 'quasi'-standards.
This is why having more browser diversity is important. We can't have people thinking that "the web" has a feature once Chrome releases it.
Not to mention all fonts appearing bolder than they should compared to Chrome and Safari. It might seem like a small thing but I'm a stickler for typography and it really stands out on a Mac.
I hope they get around to fixing these issues but two years is a long time for such an obvious bug. What confuses me is how few people have noticed given that it seems to affect all Apple silicon devices.
No they don't. https://imgur.com/a/p9V4GdN
I don't see the fonts appearing bolder difference (on my 4k screen). Actually that's not true, I have seen differences on lower DPI displays. I get around that using BetterDisplay to enable HiDPI on the external. I've also never noticed San Francisco font rendering improperly which I only would if it didn't fit in a clipped box.
Now that performance is largely improved, maybe they'll get around to fixing this one.
Very few sites only work on chrome. Firefox is fast, and the auto tab discard works better for me than Chrome's equivalent (or the Marvelous Suspender), I really like container tabs, and the whole experience feels pretty snappy. There are some product affordances I don't get with Firefox (ex. being able to run math expressions in the address bar), but it's small potatoes.
They also have some other really good tools they support such as firefox relay which is basically a proxy email address for your main email so you can post your an address on the airwaves w/o compromising your main email.
Pocket for saving articles you read on the internet.
Mozilla Thunderbird?
This works here for me just fine, at least for simple ones
Thanks to your comment, I did some more research and discovered an about:config flag (browser.urlbar.suggest.calculator) that fixes this for me!
As much as I detest and avoid all things Google in so many ways, Chrome remains preferable because at least it can deliver 50+ open tabs on a completely ordinary laptop without completely freezing everything to shit.
You've had so many years to get this basic thing right Mozilla, yet you keep failing, and for a company that claims to track less than the others, then what the fuck is your browser doing to keep being so goddam slow?
The GP is likely going to be triggered by those words, because... I've seen this repeated every X months/years... "Oh... yeah, you had problems in the past, but it's so much better now"... and... it rarely is. GP will just need to try out again at their own schedule and make their own determination.
I had this standard issue with desktop/laptop linux for years... "xyx doesn't work well"... "Oh yeah, it's so much better now - no problems now". Try the new recommendation - still broken.
I had a f2f with someone at a local meetup, and we got in to "xyz is subpar/broken on linux" (some gnome thing possibly). This happened to be a linux user group, and someone challenged me with "no, you're wrong, it's fine now". So... I pulled out the laptop and fired it up and showed the irritation/bug. The response - after showing that what I was saying was a bug - was a shrug and "Oh, I don't care about that - doesn't affect me". The verbal equivalent of "WONTFIX". In person.
tldr: telling people who've been burned - often for years - that things are "better now" is generally not all the productive. Most of the time, people who have specific/legit issues will figure out if/when they're fixed or tolerable enough.
Then Firefox needs to handle that better. As an end user, I don't care about the quality of the JS of the sites I want to browse - I just want it to work, and if it works in Chrome but not Firefox then I guess I'll switch to Chrome.
I haven’t tested this with Firefox’s password manager, but I did test in firefox and Bitwarden is auto filling correctly, and in iOS settings I see Firefox is listed as a password manager.
It’s settings->passwords->password options. I don’t think apps can automatically enable auto fill, you might have to manually enable this.
Yes, explaining away a blatant self-contradiction can be challenging.
You're not holding yourselves to the highest standards of privacy, you've explicitly prioritized data collection over privacy.
(Opt-in is a method of verifying consent)
After all these years, it still does what I need, how I need it done. That's the best recommendation of a product I think I can give.
Just about my only complaint is I wish there was a way to more quickly cancel saving a duplicate file. When the prompt appears with "this file already exists, do you want to overwrite?" it's much faster to just click "yes" than to click "no" and then drag the mouse down to "cancel" to close the window. Do this once it's no biggy. Do it hundreds or thousands of times and it gets obnoxious. Waste of bandwidth and disk writes, or waste of time.
I know that sounds dumb, but it's one of the only pain points I have.
I have Firefox installed for testing WASM targets, and everything seems slower than usual.
If you open 20+ tabs, the UI seems to be laggy. At some point, I had to kill a tab, the whole browser froze for a while.
Doesn't seem to be a resource issue unless Linux is doing something odd.
Are you swapping out? I think a lot of people don't realize how heavy web pages are, often taking up hundreds of MB of RAM (at least) for each tab. I highly recommend the Auto Tab Discard plugin. I'm terrible with leaving tabs around, and tab suspension plugins let me continue that bad habit.
I just tweaked vm.swappiness, and there's no obvious change.
Maybe I'll give firefox another shot.
Even then it's still significantly slower than chrome, even with ads.
I think it's time I find a different mobile browser with adblocking.
Ofc, Safari beats them both but I hate Safari's plugins system so I need a browser that doesn't need an AppleID to install plugins.
I'm curious, for those of you who use Chrome ... why do you (vs. another browser)?
Using Kiwi Browser on mobile so I can install any extensions.
At Mozilla's level, though, I wouldn't necessarily expect that to hold water. They should be able to write great code in either language.
A rewrite (by people familiar with the original and its pain points) is an excellent opportunity to optimize.
I vaguely remember reading here about a company that slapped a backend together in Python. When they took off, the compute costs stung, so they rewrote in Go. Saved most of the bill. Some time later that started creaking, so they rewrote again. In Python, but managed to save most of the bill again.
?
That's really suprising to read when on my low-end laptop from 2012, Firefox runs with 20 open tabs without ever facing any issue (I have something like 30 tabs open right now).
[1] E.g. creating the new jitter for Ladybird.
However, I don’t login to sensitive sites such as my bank account or Gmail for fear of data being passed on to the Chinese Communist Party.
Does anyone actually care about loading speeds (apart from the necessary ad blocking)?
It's kinda like money imo: You think you don't care about it until you don't have it. The only time I've ever cared about loading speeds was when I stayed on LTS Firefox for 2 years to avoid switching to WebExtensions, because I wanted to keep using several addons that were discontinued in Quantum. And near the end...yeah I cared about loading time. Felt amazing when I finally did upgrade (although I'm still pissed af that they never re-added the ability for extensions to access tab-specific history & will never get over this unless they do one day add it).
So I do think it's important to pay attention to even when no one cares, just to make sure that no one starts caring.
Curious, what was the use case for this?
I still actively get mad that I can't use this shortcut every single time I have to go to the physical buttons.
Anyway, it was a rhetorical question, not one that needed an answer.
It’s rarely ever mentioned though and not something that significant gains are regularly made in, which is a bit strange to me. Browsers across the board have crossed the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to speed, I’d personally rather they shift focus towards battery friendliness.
Fortunately it never affected any need to switch to another browser since I'm plugged in 95% of the time.
Personally I don't see why Firefox can't just stop JavaScript execution on tabs that aren't visible after say 5 seconds, unless the user has enabled background execution.
Stopping it entirely and then suddenly restarting on foreground would be probably too much of a breaking change for the websites' developers. I mean, I guess it could be possible but would require properly thinking it through. Some browsers aggressively freeze background tabs but AFAIR they do full reload on unfreeze.
The breakage area of shipping that kind of change into the web ecosystem of a major browser is huge.
Mozilla gets a lot of flak (especially around here!) for their sometimes heavy-handed usage analytics, but it's nice to see that used for its stated purpose! Great use of data here.
Edit: I'm not saying that Lynx should be a daily driver or that it's more secure, but it's a neat little project that avoids some of the bad patterns in modern browsers.
100% true, definitely
There's also a ton of promoted garbage on your homepage and privacy switches that need to be toggled off by default. Those settings don't carry-over when you sync your account settings.
I still prefer Firefox, but they are not immune to the encroaching enshittification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofac
on the other hand Microsoft and Facebook are doing this all the time.
But I hold the others to zero standard. There is less than zero trust there. I expect to be abused by them because their mandate requires them to ignore my wishes. It's not a failure but a success to them.
Most US hospitals are non-profits but you still see people complaining about them.
Pseudonymous user so concerned about privacy that they use the browser with by far the greatest density of exploitable flaws.
Lynx definitely takes less telemetry data than Firefox, but it also gets substantially fewer updates, including security updates. I think text-based browsing is pretty fun but I don't really use it in no small part because of the infrequency of updates.
"I love Lynx" is different from "I use Lynx for security-sensitive browsing," and "greatest density of publicly documented exploitable flaws" is, even if true (I don't know), not the same as "greatest density of exploitable flaws."
This advice mainly applies to people using old OSes or who don't update their browsers.
Telemetry doesn't make it possible, it makes it less expensive.
2) Conduct user studies
How are companies that aren't software vendors and aren't able to spy on their customers able to do it? Did software companies not have good ways to do this before spying on their users?
Only listening to data from 1 & 2 results in the sort of angry posts you frequently see on HN complaining that devs aren't listening to "real users" or have the wrong priorities.
You end up needing data from additional sources, telemetry being one of them.
If that's the sort of responses your studies produce, then your studies are seriously flawed.
Significant bugs can affect only 1% or 0.1% of a browser's userbase but at Chrome scale or even Firefox scale that's like a million people. If you don't have telemetry it is REALLY hard to hear from those people about their problems and understand them. There simply are not alternative solutions that work half as well as opt-in (or opt-out) telemetry. People who say web browsers don't need telemetry are simply ignorant of what it's like to ship one and try to keep it working in the face of a constantly shifting environment - broken drivers, broken VPNs, malicious websites, malicious extensions, broken hardware, and users who are confused or tired or simply just bad at using software. No one is speaking on their behalf, you have to dig their suffering out of the data by looking at crash reports and performance metrics.
Shipping a web browser used by a million (or a billion) users means that you have a responsibility to do a good job. If your browser is not well engineered and reliable and responsive to users' needs that can result in data breaches or third-party server outages when your browser misbehaves or incorrectly channels user intent.
I'm personally a fan of making usage telemetry opt-in instead of opt-out, but browsers are a case where I don't opt out because I know how important the data is for browser vendors to make informed decisions.
This is of course different from sending your browsing history to Google, Microsoft, or any other company. I encourage people not to opt in to that stuff and not to sync their history/bookmarks/etc to those companies.
It's probably no accident that spying on users got popular just as this became the case. Constant network traffic while web browsing didn't start to become the norm until late in the '00s, either. If you weren't clicking links, you could often open Wireshark or sniff with Netcat and see nothing. Not from your browser, not from anything. Certainly ~nobody was collecting heatmaps of where you move your mouse, or firing a network request if you selected text. Or recording entire user sessions for playback, or so you can watch them live (god, those tools are creepy as hell)
When the internet was young, and most people were using dial up connections, just collecting the dates and times that a person was online and using a program was (and still is) a massive violation of privacy. Software "phoning home", even just to check for updates (collecting IP addresses, timestamps, and version numbers) was enough to get your software branded as spyware.
No software company needs to know which hours I'm awake, when I'm using my computer, which hours I work, which hours I use their program, how long I use their program, how long it's been since I last used their program, etc. It's intrusive, entirely none of their business, and it's insane that they all feel entitled to that kind of information.
If I print something, don't print something, or what the things I print are is also none of their business. Neither is what I'm printing it for, where I put the printout after I take it from the printer tray, or if I use tape or a thumb tack to secure it in place, but you can bet that if software could easily collect that data it would and somehow it would be considered impossible to write good software without that information.
From a privacy standpoint telemetry is always invasive, which is why I disable it any way that I can. Even without the privacy aspect telemetry is a bad idea. I don't want program updates that remove features just because I (and others) don't use them very often. I don't want updates that constantly shuffle the UI around according to how they think "most" people have been using it this week. I don't want my workflow disrupted every few months because it's uncommon. I don't want the way I choose to use the software on my device to influence how other people are expected to use it either.
Telemetry is much better when it's limited to reporting errors and bugs, but even that should be opt-in only.
Data analysis is difficult to perform and understand well. It is easy to draw mistaken conclusions or to twist results to show the conclusion a person wants, and using detailed numbers can lead to a false sense of confidence in the results.
Companies are first and foremost optimizing for their benefit, not the user. Detailed tracking can uncover interesting ways for a company to make more money at the expense of the user.
I feel like people who are fully against telemetry never had to deal with such issues in big apps
If a team is so unfamiliar with their product and customer base that it cannot take action without telemetry, maybe they're not the right team to make that product. Statistics are not a substitute for domain knowledge.
Whenever I hear that an app is collecting telemetry I feel conflicted between leaving it on for maintainers to gain a better understanding of performance and potential issues, or off so that it's not used to profile me.
It would be nice if telemetry was somehow simply differentiated through some app options.
Example: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/chromium/src/+/main:bas...
I’m mentioning this, because this open-closed ambiguity is a typical Google strategy. Similarly, Android in the AOSP flavor is open, but the OS that actually ships on phones is different.
Preferences > Privacy > Firefox Data Collection and Use. Uncheck a couple boxes.
* Found this: https://github.com/K3V1991/Disable-Firefox-Telemetry-and-Dat... I haven't compared their list to the one I've used before but it's along the same lines and explains the discrepancy between the config settings and Firefox's actual behavior.
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7k3r9u/mozilla_is_...
> Telemetry data is stored locally by default. As long as the relevant options in the settings' UI are unchecked, or datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled is set to false in about:config, this data won't be sent. <https://medium.com/georg-fritzsche/data-preference-changes-i...>
There's likely to still be some non-telemetry chatter, like checking for available Firefox/plugin updates etc.
If there is one thing we should have learned over the past decade, it should be that if the data is collected, it will be sent.
I followed the argument and I understand what you are saying. What I am saying is that it was not that long ago that FF decided to disable plugins remotely ( I think we even discussed it on HN[1]). What makes you think they won't one day push an update to just upload that local data?
I'd imagine it's a buffer; presumably someone using Firefox for a decade with telemetry off won't accumulate ten years worth of telemetry pings.
Another example is usage telemetry tells developers what part of the app is being used and can help them focus popular features or on working to let people know about useful but under used portions of the app.
My main complaint about people who dislike telemetry is they never acknowledge its good uses and they never state what telemetry is objectionable.
It’s like you’re arguing about the good things the church does when it’s a discussion on separation of church and state.
But I mean I’m an atheist and I think religion is, on net, bad. But we’ve allowed a sort of less dangerous version of it to persist in most advanced countries, in the form of separation of church and state. If it was really just all bad, I suppose we’d ban it altogether.
I think people can generally see that there are some pros to things they don’t like. Not engaging with the aspects of something that are inconvenient to your case puts you in the realm of propaganda and rhetoric, not good faith discussion.
There's a good reason for that: it is an asymmetric relationship.
The person who enabled telemetry isn't necessarily the user of the software. Ie. it can be mandated or put on by a sysadmin (even by mistake), without user's say. On top of that, the user of the software and/or sysadmin are unable to assess whether they want to share the data because they cannot analyze the data beforehand. They lack the expertise in doing so.
Meanwhile I have to disable telemetry every friggin' time I use Mozilla Firefox. It gets old, having to say 'no' all the time, ya know? I now realize how it feels being a young woman on the market. Geez, I feel sorry for my daughter. The shit she'll have to endure, sayin' 'no' all the time.
Probably because there's little disagreement about the existence of the benefits of it or what they are. That's not the issue.
For me, the issue (as with all things like this) is about consent. Opt-in telemetry? I have no issue with it. Opt-out telemetry? Very sketchy, but at least you can opt out. Undisclosed or mandatory telemetry? Completely unacceptable.
You can get directly there by copying into the url bar
about:preferences#privacy
(Edited, original comment read: "What more information does that give them than just buying a few computers at different price points?")
That doesn't seem very useful for the metrics shown in that article. For hard to find bugs sure, for 95th percentile calculations and so on you can just buy a few computers at a retail store and get the same information.
Once you do have a model of badness I agree it's better to try to set that up yourself.
So, they collect lots and lots of telemetry and what do they do with it?
> Let’s start with page load. First Contentful Paint (FCP) is a better metric for felt performance than the `onload` event.
Misinterpret and misuse it. Better, my a**.
I can't describe how much I HATE pages that are rendered before they are completely loaded.
I type an adress, I hit enter, and promptly I see the page content. I try to click a link or a button on the page, but guess what? Just before I click it, an image just loaded above the link. The link moved down from under the cursor, and now I click the image instead of the link. And the image IS AN AD!!!
It's like FF devs are actually TRYING to make me click ads!