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A complicating factor on the telemetry is that both this new "guess" option and its predecessor list are/were in the menubar View menu and have no way to be acc

A complicating factor on the telemetry is that both this new "guess" option and its predecessor list are/were in the menubar View menu and have no way to be accessed through the "hamburger," so there wasn't a default-visible way to get to this functionality for Windows and Linux users. This is a pretty familiar pattern for controversial telemetry-based browser decisions, first making the feature more obscure or hidden, then later noting that few people are using it when justifying change/removal. How many users just abandoned a site they used to use or switched browsers is not captured in the telemetry (though options to switch to that still offer this feature are pretty thin on the ground). To be clear I don't think this was a "blind" telemetry decision; the developer seems to have done a pretty thoughtful and thorough analysis about it. But you see the pattern of such changes over the years and you start to imagine there's a thumb on the scale...

dan-robertson 5y ago
I’m not convinced that making it easier to find the menu of cryptic encodings would help. I think users would more easily discover that chrome correctly detects the encoding so perhaps the issue is just that the auto-detector needs to be a little better. Indeed if users were just going to chrome that would not show up in telemetry and so a low number would still not mean the the menu needs to be more visible. But this is all speculation really.
- hsivonen 5y ago
  In cases where Chrome autodetects, Firefox autodetects, too. In the cases where you'd use the remaining menu item in Firefox, Chrome offers no recourse (apart from extensions).
aftbit 5y ago
Pro-tip: press Alt and you get the menu back, at least on my Linux.
- yoasif_ 5y ago
  Windows as well.
hsivonen 5y ago
> A complicating factor on the telemetry is that both this new "guess" option and its predecessor list are/were in the menubar View menu and have no way to be accessed through the "hamburger," so there wasn't a default-visible way to get to this functionality for Windows and Linux users. The collapsing the submenu of the View menu into a single item shipped in Firefox 91. The submenu was removed from the hamburger menu in Firefox 89. This order of changes was unfortunate. If I had gotten the single-item design done sooner, perhaps the rewritten hamburger menu would have kept the single item instead of removing the entry point altogether.

dan-robertson 5y ago

I’m not convinced that making it easier to find the menu of cryptic encodings would help. I think users would more easily discover that chrome correctly detects the encoding so perhaps the issue is just that the auto-detector needs to be a little better. Indeed if users were just going to chrome that would not show up in telemetry and so a low number would still not mean the the menu needs to be more visible. But this is all speculation really.

hsivonen 5y ago
In cases where Chrome autodetects, Firefox autodetects, too. In the cases where you'd use the remaining menu item in Firefox, Chrome offers no recourse (apart from extensions).

aftbit 5y ago

Pro-tip: press Alt and you get the menu back, at least on my Linux.

yoasif_ 5y ago
Windows as well.

hsivonen 5y ago

> A complicating factor on the telemetry is that both this new "guess" option and its predecessor list are/were in the menubar View menu and have no way to be accessed through the "hamburger," so there wasn't a default-visible way to get to this functionality for Windows and Linux users. The collapsing the submenu of the View menu into a single item shipped in Firefox 91. The submenu was removed from the hamburger menu in Firefox 89. This order of changes was unfortunate. If I had gotten the single-item design done sooner, perhaps the rewritten hamburger menu would have kept the single item instead of removing the entry point altogether.