"Need" is the key phrase. If it wants to check for updates, do telemetry, fiddle around, whatever, that's fine by me. It should not shit the bed if it has to

"Need" is the key phrase. If it wants to check for updates, do telemetry, fiddle around, whatever, that's fine by me. It should not shit the bed if it has to go a few hours without doing so, however. For example, you recall a couple of years ago when Mozilla screwed up their certificates and every Firefox extension was simultaneously disabled. That should not have happened. That should have resulted in a pop-up box that said "The security of your extensions cannot be verified. Using them at this time could be highly dangerous. Disable them to browse safely? Yes/No" Instead Mozilla just blanket turned them all off, which had the potential for getting people killed as they suddenly found themselves not protected by VPN/Tor/NoScript/etc extensions.