9 ms·

Great work! This is also a good example of the benefit of telemetry: that they have crash numbers coming back from the field lets them tell that this really di

by jefftk 4y ago

Great work! This is also a good example of the benefit of telemetry: that they have crash numbers coming back from the field lets them tell that this really did work in practice and get a sense of how much of the problem they've solved.

323 4y ago
HN mantra: * telemetry is evil * if the product is free (Firefox), you are the product
- xeromal 4y ago
  So say we all
- mcdonje 4y ago
  I get the saying. But in this case, Mozilla gets most of its money from search royalties, primarily from Google. We are Google's product, not Firefox's.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    It's both. Firefox sell you to Google, Google sell you to advertisers. It seems Firefox executives take a large chunk of money from Google; presumably to make sure Firefox doesn't do anything too wild that would reduce Googles income.
    - derefr 4y ago
      > presumably to make sure Firefox doesn't do anything too wild I wonder how much of what the Tor Browser version of Firefox does, would be upstreamed to Firefox proper, if not for that deal? (I wonder how much the Firefox team considers Tor Browser to be "the real Firefox" / "Firefox the way we intended", with Firefox itself just being "the sell-out version of Firefox"?)
    - Cerium 4y ago
      Instead of viewing the situation as Firefox selling me down the river to Google, I like to view it as an opportunity for collective bargaining. Firefox is my union representative. They are better able to fight for my interests against Google than should I go it alone and use Chrome.
      - avian 4y ago
        What motivation does Firefox have to fight for your interests?
        _ea1k 4y ago
        People use it purely for that reason. If they don't, their usage will drop, which will reduce their revenue. The fact that this revenue comes from Google is largely a byproduct. Its not a perfect system, but it should somewhat work.
        Cerium 4y ago
        I'm not sure - I guess the same motivation that supports the open source movement. I am satisfied that the actions Firefox has taken so far does tend to support my interests.
        eitland 4y ago
        Kind of. I love updates like this. But many of us who used it from the start think it was a much better browser before. For a long so much was sacrificed for next to no improvement. For me it was more or less rock solid at >800 tabs and with a lot less memory and more exciting extensions than I have now. I admit this wasn't everyones experience, but as a superuser tool it has degraded a lot over the years. That said it is still the best browser for me: I don't think anyone else except Orion (which is Mac only) has actual tree style tabs (not to be confused with vertical, non indented tabs as seen in Opera derivatives).
        sfink 4y ago
        continued existence
- dibt 4y ago
  curl, sqlite, awk, etc. They're all free. Am I the product?
krageon 4y ago
- judge2020 4y ago
  By selling that software to user once, then only improving it a year or two later based on any quirks that got enough people mad enough to actually send an email to complain about it. If it’s too critical, then there goes a quarter of your user base.
  - remram 4y ago
    If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Can you act on telemetry faster than email? Why?
    - jefftk 4y ago
      People have a high threshold for sending emails, and most users will never send them. So if a change only makes things a bit slower / crashier or makes things much worse but mostly just for users who don't complain, you don't know. In this case "Firefox crashes sometimes" remains true even after their fix reduced the number of crashes by 70%.
    - sbergot 4y ago
      Because the email might be incomplete or not representative of the majority of users, leading you to work on irrelevant problems.
    - lkbm 4y ago
      > If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Usually no. I very rarely email software providers to complain about their software. I'll usually just uninstall. Some software has more of a relationship with users than others. Doing support for B2B SaaS, I knew many of the users by name, and they knew me. Even then, though, some people would just live with terrible bugs for a long time. We once had an issue where the initial page post login would take 30+ seconds to load because it synchronously calculated a bunch of their stats. I don't recall anyone writing in to complain, and when I fixed it, I don't think they said anything. (The slowdown was a boiled frog situation, since it got slower as they grew.) Because it was a website, we could see the load time, and I saw it and fixed it, but if it were desktop software, the only way we'd have known would have been to load up a test account with hundreds of thousands of fake users and orders and fake shipments, and gone through the process of using the fake data in a real way. Load testing is obviously good, but it will never beat being able to see how it performs for real users, and just hoping those real users will report back to you is completely unrealistic. Don't get me wrong: I handled thousands of bug reports and feature requests during my time in support, and we got a lot of useful feedback. But insight into the actual performance is critical. Major bugs will go unreported for a long time. People just expect software to be buggy these days.
freediver 4y ago
> This is also a good example of the benefit of telemetry: The benefit can be claimed only if the user consented into their private information being shared with the browser vendor in the first place. With most browser telemetry that is not the case and browser is simply not respecting users' privacy. The right to privacy, as a human right, trumps the 'right' to have the product 'improved'. Otherwise we can find "benefit" in everything. One of the benefits of hell, for example, is that it is never cold.
- TheJoeMan 4y ago
  If Firefox was selling a physical product in a retail store, they would be able to watch you walk around the store on CCTV, see you avoided an aisle because there is a polar bear lurking, and then remove the polar bear. But since the product is digital they just have to give it away blind? Never knowing if people even use the features or not?
  - freediver 4y ago
    Yes. Otherwise, would you accept your home/apartment to have telemetry so that the home builder knows what rooms/features you use or not?
    - cedilla 4y ago
      Software isn't a house. It's also not a car or whatever your favourite other analogies are.
      - Eleison23 4y ago
        Software is often described as "tools" and so an analogy to a drill or a magnifying glass is as apt as any. In fact a car is a good analogy to a browser because we use browsers as sort of a "second home" in our computer and it allows us to "visit websites" and a browser is a whole ecosystem unto itself. So if software is a tool and my drill is monitoring the holes I make in stuff and its efficacy in doing that, that seems fine, but if the drill is sitting in my toolbox being a busybody and sending back everything it can find about me from within the toolbox, that drill is made by assholes, don't you agree?
deafpolygon 4y ago
> a good example of the benefit of telemetry For what it's worth, I have no issues with telemetry as long as they are opt-in and there is transparency on exactly what is collected. It's having to opt-out (or not being to opt-out at all) and vague explanation on what and why there is telemetry that I take issues with.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Opt-in telemetry is nearly worthless for most uses as it's a very biased sample from the get-go. Crash logs are a different beast.
  - tjoff 4y ago
    That hardly makes them worthless. And very biased towards what? People not triggering bugs?
    - hunter2_ 4y ago
      There might be a correlation between people who push their memory consumption to the limit and people who never opt into anything they don't directly benefit from, thinking that such optional stuff would hinder them from using all of their memory for personal benefit. OTOH, those people might realize that telemetry will eventually increase efficiency, allowing them to do more with their available memory...
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      biased against most users. opt-in telemetry is effectively the same as no telemetry. if you have (or anyone has) a problem with crash statistics being tracked via telemetry then I have absolutely zero idea how to convince you that it's a good idea that this blog post doesn't already clearly state. it's the same with OS updates; people (generally) simply will not perform system or security updates unless they are forced, because everyone thinks they are smarter than the "script kiddies" who would use an attack against them. the user thinks they would see an attack coming and avoid it. in short, they don't. viruses spread, the US Congress calls Microsoft in and asks why the systems weren't patched, and Microsoft says "the users are responsible for patching" and Congress doesn't like it. so now we are where we are. OS updates are forced after a time, and telemetry is not only the norm, but a very good idea for applications in use by millions of people, like Firefox.
Farow 4y ago
Couldn't crash reports be separated from other telemetry data, possibly with a dialog letting the user whether to send a crash report or not? IIRC, the dialog used to actually exist in older Firefox versions. I find the amount of data they collect[1] to be borderline creepy. [1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
- kbrosnan 4y ago
  The crash reports at https://crash-stats.mozilla.org https://crash-stats.mozilla.org are a separate opt in bit of telemetry which is a dialog that is shown when Firefox crashes. You can opt into automatically sending them by setting browser.crashReports.unsubmittedCheck.autoSubmit2 to true. It can be true if you opted into a dialog about submitting unsubmitted crash reports. https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/?search=crash https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/?search=crash shows automatic telemetry probes. The main bit of data in that set is FX_CONTENT_CRASH_* and you can see the back and forth from the data steward and the engineer adding the probe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269961#c8 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269961#c8
- sfink 4y ago
  > I find the amount of data they collect[1] to be borderline creepy. What in that report is creepy? Surely knowing the percentage of people on 32- vs 64-bit isn't problematic. Maybe add-ons? I'm genuinely curious.
  - Farow 4y ago
    Usage times, usage intensity, list of all extensions, country of origin. I don't understand why they'd need those to improve Firefox. Next thing you know they might try to increase engagement time like they're some sort of social network. "Unlock the new exclusive colorway by logging in 30 days in a row." seems like something that could be implemented, seeing how they're time limited already.
    - sfink 4y ago
ColonelPhantom 4y ago
Purely technical telemetry like this is indeed useful. The problem comes when telemetry is used to justify deleting useful features such as compact mode. The "make it hard to find" to "nobody uses it" to "let's delete it" pipeline is very real. Reminds me of the "defund it" -> "it does not work" -> "let's privatize it" pipeline in right-wing governments.
renewiltord 4y ago
My personal objective with most situations is to discourage other people from enabling telemetry and then enabling it myself. As a larger piece of the visible audience, I then hope that more attention is given me. This is especially important for open source projects. And I don't care that much about what the company is getting from me. But listen, they collect all sorts of stuff and you should disable it unless you understand it. Ideally, privacy laws expand to the point where you need to email a signature saying you understand before you opt in to telemetry. Informed consent is required for any reasonable study.
johannes1234321 4y ago
So that is a crash reporter, which fires when a crash was detected and asks for submittal. Not telemetry, which constantly records users actions.
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Telemetry just means any data about operations that are sent back to the mothership. Crash logs are just as much telemetry as a click event log. Equating any telemetry=spying is a knee jerk reaction to tech companies abusing telemetry.
  - eviks 4y ago
    Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry disagrees, note the automatic transmission > Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring
    - kortex 4y ago
      >> Equating any telemetry=spying is a knee jerk reaction to tech companies abusing telemetry. > Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry disagrees It feels like your response fails to address the point colejohnson66 is making. They are saying "some spying is done via telemetry, but not all telemetry is spyware." The automatic nature of it is orthogonal to its spy-ness or user hostility. Basically, "automatic" here is an antonym to "manual" e.g. user emailing a bug report. Personally, I consider the following sorts of telemetry "not spyware": - coarse grained crash report (build version, arch, etc). this is usually a manual prompt on crash, so "semi-automatic telemetry" is how I'd define it - anonymized metrics/spans. Basically "foo_bar() took 20ms". These are "automatic" in that the collection and transmission happen without user input, but that's orthogonal to whether the user opted in/out. Fine-grained usage information is a lot more spyware-esque.
      - 4y ago

by jefftk 4y ago

323 4y ago

HN mantra: * telemetry is evil * if the product is free (Firefox), you are the product

xeromal 4y ago
So say we all
mcdonje 4y ago
I get the saying. But in this case, Mozilla gets most of its money from search royalties, primarily from Google. We are Google's product, not Firefox's.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  It's both. Firefox sell you to Google, Google sell you to advertisers. It seems Firefox executives take a large chunk of money from Google; presumably to make sure Firefox doesn't do anything too wild that would reduce Googles income.
  - derefr 4y ago
    > presumably to make sure Firefox doesn't do anything too wild I wonder how much of what the Tor Browser version of Firefox does, would be upstreamed to Firefox proper, if not for that deal? (I wonder how much the Firefox team considers Tor Browser to be "the real Firefox" / "Firefox the way we intended", with Firefox itself just being "the sell-out version of Firefox"?)
  - Cerium 4y ago
    Instead of viewing the situation as Firefox selling me down the river to Google, I like to view it as an opportunity for collective bargaining. Firefox is my union representative. They are better able to fight for my interests against Google than should I go it alone and use Chrome.
    - avian 4y ago
      What motivation does Firefox have to fight for your interests?
      - _ea1k 4y ago
        People use it purely for that reason. If they don't, their usage will drop, which will reduce their revenue. The fact that this revenue comes from Google is largely a byproduct. Its not a perfect system, but it should somewhat work.
      - Cerium 4y ago
        I'm not sure - I guess the same motivation that supports the open source movement. I am satisfied that the actions Firefox has taken so far does tend to support my interests.
        eitland 4y ago
        Kind of. I love updates like this. But many of us who used it from the start think it was a much better browser before. For a long so much was sacrificed for next to no improvement. For me it was more or less rock solid at >800 tabs and with a lot less memory and more exciting extensions than I have now. I admit this wasn't everyones experience, but as a superuser tool it has degraded a lot over the years. That said it is still the best browser for me: I don't think anyone else except Orion (which is Mac only) has actual tree style tabs (not to be confused with vertical, non indented tabs as seen in Opera derivatives).
      - sfink 4y ago
        continued existence
dibt 4y ago
curl, sqlite, awk, etc. They're all free. Am I the product?

krageon 4y ago

judge2020 4y ago
By selling that software to user once, then only improving it a year or two later based on any quirks that got enough people mad enough to actually send an email to complain about it. If it’s too critical, then there goes a quarter of your user base.
- remram 4y ago
  If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Can you act on telemetry faster than email? Why?
  - jefftk 4y ago
    People have a high threshold for sending emails, and most users will never send them. So if a change only makes things a bit slower / crashier or makes things much worse but mostly just for users who don't complain, you don't know. In this case "Firefox crashes sometimes" remains true even after their fix reduced the number of crashes by 70%.
  - sbergot 4y ago
    Because the email might be incomplete or not representative of the majority of users, leading you to work on irrelevant problems.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    > If it's too critical, wouldn't they send an email about it? Usually no. I very rarely email software providers to complain about their software. I'll usually just uninstall. Some software has more of a relationship with users than others. Doing support for B2B SaaS, I knew many of the users by name, and they knew me. Even then, though, some people would just live with terrible bugs for a long time. We once had an issue where the initial page post login would take 30+ seconds to load because it synchronously calculated a bunch of their stats. I don't recall anyone writing in to complain, and when I fixed it, I don't think they said anything. (The slowdown was a boiled frog situation, since it got slower as they grew.) Because it was a website, we could see the load time, and I saw it and fixed it, but if it were desktop software, the only way we'd have known would have been to load up a test account with hundreds of thousands of fake users and orders and fake shipments, and gone through the process of using the fake data in a real way. Load testing is obviously good, but it will never beat being able to see how it performs for real users, and just hoping those real users will report back to you is completely unrealistic. Don't get me wrong: I handled thousands of bug reports and feature requests during my time in support, and we got a lot of useful feedback. But insight into the actual performance is critical. Major bugs will go unreported for a long time. People just expect software to be buggy these days.

freediver 4y ago

> This is also a good example of the benefit of telemetry: The benefit can be claimed only if the user consented into their private information being shared with the browser vendor in the first place. With most browser telemetry that is not the case and browser is simply not respecting users' privacy. The right to privacy, as a human right, trumps the 'right' to have the product 'improved'. Otherwise we can find "benefit" in everything. One of the benefits of hell, for example, is that it is never cold.

TheJoeMan 4y ago
If Firefox was selling a physical product in a retail store, they would be able to watch you walk around the store on CCTV, see you avoided an aisle because there is a polar bear lurking, and then remove the polar bear. But since the product is digital they just have to give it away blind? Never knowing if people even use the features or not?
- freediver 4y ago
  Yes. Otherwise, would you accept your home/apartment to have telemetry so that the home builder knows what rooms/features you use or not?
  - cedilla 4y ago
    Software isn't a house. It's also not a car or whatever your favourite other analogies are.
    - Eleison23 4y ago
      Software is often described as "tools" and so an analogy to a drill or a magnifying glass is as apt as any. In fact a car is a good analogy to a browser because we use browsers as sort of a "second home" in our computer and it allows us to "visit websites" and a browser is a whole ecosystem unto itself. So if software is a tool and my drill is monitoring the holes I make in stuff and its efficacy in doing that, that seems fine, but if the drill is sitting in my toolbox being a busybody and sending back everything it can find about me from within the toolbox, that drill is made by assholes, don't you agree?

deafpolygon 4y ago

> a good example of the benefit of telemetry For what it's worth, I have no issues with telemetry as long as they are opt-in and there is transparency on exactly what is collected. It's having to opt-out (or not being to opt-out at all) and vague explanation on what and why there is telemetry that I take issues with.

scrollaway 4y ago
Opt-in telemetry is nearly worthless for most uses as it's a very biased sample from the get-go. Crash logs are a different beast.
- tjoff 4y ago
  That hardly makes them worthless. And very biased towards what? People not triggering bugs?
  - hunter2_ 4y ago
    There might be a correlation between people who push their memory consumption to the limit and people who never opt into anything they don't directly benefit from, thinking that such optional stuff would hinder them from using all of their memory for personal benefit. OTOH, those people might realize that telemetry will eventually increase efficiency, allowing them to do more with their available memory...
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    biased against most users. opt-in telemetry is effectively the same as no telemetry. if you have (or anyone has) a problem with crash statistics being tracked via telemetry then I have absolutely zero idea how to convince you that it's a good idea that this blog post doesn't already clearly state. it's the same with OS updates; people (generally) simply will not perform system or security updates unless they are forced, because everyone thinks they are smarter than the "script kiddies" who would use an attack against them. the user thinks they would see an attack coming and avoid it. in short, they don't. viruses spread, the US Congress calls Microsoft in and asks why the systems weren't patched, and Microsoft says "the users are responsible for patching" and Congress doesn't like it. so now we are where we are. OS updates are forced after a time, and telemetry is not only the norm, but a very good idea for applications in use by millions of people, like Firefox.

Farow 4y ago

Couldn't crash reports be separated from other telemetry data, possibly with a dialog letting the user whether to send a crash report or not? IIRC, the dialog used to actually exist in older Firefox versions. I find the amount of data they collect[1] to be borderline creepy. [1] https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

kbrosnan 4y ago
The crash reports at https://crash-stats.mozilla.org https://crash-stats.mozilla.org are a separate opt in bit of telemetry which is a dialog that is shown when Firefox crashes. You can opt into automatically sending them by setting browser.crashReports.unsubmittedCheck.autoSubmit2 to true. It can be true if you opted into a dialog about submitting unsubmitted crash reports. https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/?search=crash https://probes.telemetry.mozilla.org/?search=crash shows automatic telemetry probes. The main bit of data in that set is FX_CONTENT_CRASH_* and you can see the back and forth from the data steward and the engineer adding the probe. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269961#c8 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1269961#c8
sfink 4y ago
> I find the amount of data they collect[1] to be borderline creepy. What in that report is creepy? Surely knowing the percentage of people on 32- vs 64-bit isn't problematic. Maybe add-ons? I'm genuinely curious.
- Farow 4y ago
  Usage times, usage intensity, list of all extensions, country of origin. I don't understand why they'd need those to improve Firefox. Next thing you know they might try to increase engagement time like they're some sort of social network. "Unlock the new exclusive colorway by logging in 30 days in a row." seems like something that could be implemented, seeing how they're time limited already.
  - sfink 4y ago

ColonelPhantom 4y ago

Purely technical telemetry like this is indeed useful. The problem comes when telemetry is used to justify deleting useful features such as compact mode. The "make it hard to find" to "nobody uses it" to "let's delete it" pipeline is very real. Reminds me of the "defund it" -> "it does not work" -> "let's privatize it" pipeline in right-wing governments.

renewiltord 4y ago

My personal objective with most situations is to discourage other people from enabling telemetry and then enabling it myself. As a larger piece of the visible audience, I then hope that more attention is given me. This is especially important for open source projects. And I don't care that much about what the company is getting from me. But listen, they collect all sorts of stuff and you should disable it unless you understand it. Ideally, privacy laws expand to the point where you need to email a signature saying you understand before you opt in to telemetry. Informed consent is required for any reasonable study.

johannes1234321 4y ago

So that is a crash reporter, which fires when a crash was detected and asks for submittal. Not telemetry, which constantly records users actions.

colejohnson66 4y ago
Telemetry just means any data about operations that are sent back to the mothership. Crash logs are just as much telemetry as a click event log. Equating any telemetry=spying is a knee jerk reaction to tech companies abusing telemetry.
- eviks 4y ago
  Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry disagrees, note the automatic transmission > Telemetry is the in situ collection of measurements or other data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment (telecommunication) for monitoring
  - kortex 4y ago
    >> Equating any telemetry=spying is a knee jerk reaction to tech companies abusing telemetry. > Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry disagrees It feels like your response fails to address the point colejohnson66 is making. They are saying "some spying is done via telemetry, but not all telemetry is spyware." The automatic nature of it is orthogonal to its spy-ness or user hostility. Basically, "automatic" here is an antonym to "manual" e.g. user emailing a bug report. Personally, I consider the following sorts of telemetry "not spyware": - coarse grained crash report (build version, arch, etc). this is usually a manual prompt on crash, so "semi-automatic telemetry" is how I'd define it - anonymized metrics/spans. Basically "foo_bar() took 20ms". These are "automatic" in that the collection and transmission happen without user input, but that's orthogonal to whether the user opted in/out. Fine-grained usage information is a lot more spyware-esque.
    - 4y ago