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Comment by aduitsis | Hacker News Reader

For Firefox, I think that disabling the telemetry and the studies is not going to help Mozilla improve the browser.

I'm not convinced that's their goal any more. The number of users turning off or ignoring AI features is probably considered a problem, not a signal.

Every single thing for the past 10 years has had (opt-out, which most people didn't) telemetry and that correlates with a decline in quality, not improvement.

My suspicion is that this is due to three things:

- Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones

- Analytics can be used to justify otherwise unpopular or ill-advised changes

- When combined with certain changes (e.g. making features harder to access), the numbers can be “steered” in a particular direction to favor a particular outcome and better enable the last point (“Looks like nobody’s using that thing we hid behind an obscure feature flag! Guess we’re safe to remove it entirely now!”).

In theory telemetry/analytics have strong potential for improving software quality, but more often than not they’re just massaged and misused by product managers bent on pushing the software a particular direction.

> Use of analytics tends to replace user trials/interviews entirely, trading away rich signals for weaker ones

Yeah, this is huge. The 30-day A/B test is a scourge on the industry.

Telemetry in the hands of software craftsmen with a supporting business model will probably support improved software.

Telemetry in the hands of stakeholders whose stakes are business/career KPMs will probably serve those, and the software experience will follow.

And not giving IKEA access to cameras in your home won't let them improve the furniture.

But it might be accepted if the furniture cost $0.

One could hope if it happens enough they'd be jostled out of the McNamarra fallacy tarpit they've ended up in, though maybe that is too optimistic.

They don't care about improving the browser anymore. They just want to make it into an AI browser.

For Firefox they had a decade+ to stop making useless wasteful choices that killed any good will towards the company.

I still use Firefox but I, frankly, feel it's stagnated. On mobile I'm in the process of changing habits to something else (auto reflex sometimes still opens Ffox, but lately I'm circling back to opera, which I stopped using on desktop what... 20 years ago?)

All this to say, I don't think Mozilla is doing much with all the telemetry data it's gathered all these years

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