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This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project. Otherwise if i
by mgbmtl 5y ago
This will be an unpopular opinion here, but for developers, telemetry is a really useful way to make decisions about the direction of a project.
Otherwise if it's just on a whim of the lead dev, that often does not scale. And we've seen with lots of projects, that actual regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions. Switching off telemetry is easy, but I suppose you also have concerns about technical issues, and those can be really difficult to compromise on (a lot of people suggested forks when XUL was removed.. but today probably very few people would want XUL back).
To have a successful fork, you need devs with either a business model behind it, or enough motivation to maintain it as a hobby. For a while, it worked for Iceweasel, but it was just branding. Firefox is complex, requires a lot resources to build, distribute binaries, etc.
I'm not affiliated to Mozilla, but I do help maintain another open source project, where, in my opinion, power-users and consultants drove the project in a direction that made the product more difficult to use, and therefore gave it a bad reputation and limited growth. I can say that because I have access to some of the telemetry, and also because I talk to a lot of random users as part of my work.
- Communitivity 5y agoI don't mind telemetry, if it is opt-in. It should never be opt-out, but usually is.
- gtirloni 5y agoAlmost nobody goes out of their way to enable telemetry because they want to help some project. Very few power users do (and they don't represent the majority in most cases) and I'd say zero regular users would care.
- solox3 5y ago"No one opts in" aside, any opt-in metrics you do collect tend to be skewed towards how the people who opt in, use the product. Anyone serious about making product decisions using opt-in metrics should be aware of this bias.
- dmos62 5y agoThis could be solved by a lot of transperancy about what collected telemetry is saying. A user can then check if the users that opted-in to telemetry are representative of his own use cases and thus make an informed decision if he should opt-in as well (if he's not well represented). Telemtry is a lot like voting.
- spoctrial 5y agoThe vast majority of people will not read about the collected telemetry, even fewer will read it and then make a decision to opt-in.The telemetry is optimizing for the vast majority, not the loud minority, hence opt-out works better in order to cater to a larger group of users. Your voting analogy is really bad. With that said, I don't really like telemetry and will turn it off.
- dmos62 5y agoI think voting is a good analogy for telemetry. You submit your use case to help decide development direction.
- dblohm7 5y agoSo, `about:telemetry`, https://telemetry.mozilla.org https://telemetry.mozilla.org
- kaba0 5y agoThe difference between opt-in and out organ donors between otherwise similar countries is a staggering 80% — people are seriously lazy and will choose the default almost always. I think one should not be afraid to “exploit” this innate human quirk, if it is done for good reason. Unethical people will abuse it either way.
- musicale 5y agoI don't mind it if it's opt-in with a user-facing setting to turn it on or off.
- solarkraft 5y agoI don’t mind telemetry that much. I mind Pocket, ads and whatever bullshit they’ll push next week.
- chinathrow 5y agoI have some color packs for you, but they are only available briefly.
- veidr 5y agoYeah, what the fuck was that?
- chinathrow 5y agoI honestly have no clue. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/introducing-new-colorways-for-firefox-94/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/introducing-new... But reading this and answering for Mozilla staff should get them some feedback: > What’s next for Firefox colorways? We’ll see. We’ll go where our customers take us. Well, I saw and I clicked to skip this BS.
- cpeterso 5y agoAdditional "colorway" themes will be introduced seasonally, but the current colorway themes will not disappear. They will "graduate" to https://addons.mozilla.org/ https://addons.mozilla.org/.
- chinathrow 5y agoTo be honest that was not clear at all from this work-interferung modal after the upgrade to 94.0 It more read like some marketing FOMO inducing lingo like "use the new feature better now or you will miss out once they're gone". Do you have a user panel at Mozilla to vet stuff like that? I would love to participate. Being a Moz suite user since 1998.
- ReactiveJelly 5y agoand it would be fine if it was opt-in. syncthings telemetry is very transparent, so I started enabling it on my nodes. but I hate when programmers who should absolutely know the difference conflate opt-in and opt-out.
- riedel 5y agoI have question: what is the rate of opt in into telemetry? I like the concept of donating your data to improve a product. I wonder if there would not be enough data if ppl could simply chose when installing.
- kaetemi 5y agoYet Firefox went in a weird direction. Telemetry decisions, huh.
- nix0n 5y ago> regular-user feedback, not power-users, is crucial in taking those decisions In general, that's true. But Firefox is an exception to this. The most important thing to a regular user, is that their websites work. But for websites to work, the developer had to test in Firefox. So, Firefox's alienation of power users has hurt its regular userbase. There's also the distinction between users vs customers. Most users pay nothing for Firefox. A relatively small number of free-software lovers provide donations. If they want more of those people to give more money, Mozilla would have to cater to power users. This leaves Mozilla's main customer as being Google, who doesn't really want Firefox to be good. The other exception to this, is if the software you're making is so specialized, that you can get by on a handful of large institutional customers. Obviously this is not where Mozilla is, it's just another case where telemetry is not necessary.
- kaba0 5y agoWhether devs test in firefox or not is orthogonal to whether they like the product, it is entirely based on its market share. No sane person wanted to test on IE, but it was mandated by the company.
- iudqnolq 5y agoThat's partly true. N of one, but I have Firefox set up the way I want it to, so I do all my development in Firefox and then occasionally test in Chrome. Essentially all my users use Chrome, so if I didn't prefer Firefox's ux it would get much less attention
- anonymousnotme 5y agoI like the mention of large institutional customers. Is there a way where mozilla can have companies sponsor firefox to be open so that these companies do have to deal with google and MS control and any of the crap that do to try to control it. I guess it is more so that google does not have control because MS is now using chrome engine.
- mixmastamyk 5y agoIf telemetry were that useful and acted upon, we wouldn't have FF regularly breaking its interface. (Such as the stupid disconnected tabs and other vanity projects.) Almost everyone hates these kind of unique-snowflake interface changes for the sake of change.
- st3fan 5y agoIt is not an unpopular opinion. I bet most people here actually work on products that have a fair share of telemetry. How else would you know how your products are doing or what to focus on.