It is getting annoying to have to go into about:config with every release to turn things I don't want off.
Off should be default. Let those that want to use these features turn them on if they want. Or better yet, ship a damn extension.
Off should be default. Let those that want to use these features turn them on if they want. Or better yet, ship a damn extension.
Firefox doesn't even predefine some of the things in "about:config" that need to be set to turn off some of these undesirable features.
There's IceCat, a GNU fork of Firefox without all the proprietary extensions.[1] It may start getting more traction as Mozilla puts more junk in the browser.
These things are lazy loaded and wont run until you turn them on. No footprint when they're off the UI (minimal footprint when they are on)
I'm a Pocket user, but I have no idea why that needed to be integrated into the browser, seems like an insane decision to me. I hope they got a good pay day out of that.
Same as the history based advertising tiles. Sure, it's checked locally, it still seems creepy and annoying... but again, browser.newtabpage.enhanced = false.
Unless we lose this level of user choice, I don't see a better alternative. It would be nice if someone would ship some tool to automatically update a user.js file, however, I think many of us have different opinions about what feature we do and do not want enabled in our browsers.
Off by default is neither removing user choice, nor is it preventing Mozilla from saying they ship with feature X. It is the right way to present it.
It lets more sophisticated users choose. Less sophisticated users however will more likely switch to a different browser the moment a site doesn't work before poking through settings.
I think a better way than a separate setting would be to go in the direction of many software firewalls and present it to the user as a choice when an application requests it as many browsers currently do with the location APIs. This would provide individual domain-level control over what permissions sites are granted by you. I don't know why this sort of policy seems to be restricted only to the location APIs...
Before, mozilla was implementing their own pocket competitor. Switching to pocket, and existing solution, allowed them to save money.