It makes me a little sad we only ever see FF hit the front page of HN for stuff people are angry about. The FF team building useful features like tab groups that are improving UX. But I guess if it bleeds it leads.
Like `Firefox Data Collection and Use` which includes `Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla` and some other stuff is on by default. [1]
Glean data is here [2]
Historically I don't think FF would have made that decision - now I have to periodically check what else they turned on without me asking.
I generally don't like telemetry but I really don't like telemetry that is on by default - that very much should always be a "Would you like to?" question.
One person's bad thing is another person's much-anticipated feature. As long as they're optional and useful for enough users to justify the resource expenditure, I really don't see the problem.
There was a whole experiment with this "Tab Candy" thing a few years ago. And it failed and Mozilla disabled it and it got silently removed, well, almost, because a fair amount of people complained. I wouldn't be surprised if today's tab groups go the same way. Browser innovation is hard and at this point most of the innovation is in forks of Firefox, rather than Firefox itself.
I gave up on Firefox, sadly. I still use Thunderbird (which is apparently no longer part of Mozilla), but I couldn't deal with FF and Mozilla screwing around anymore.
I switched to Orion which has been working great for me. I'm happy to pay money for my browser and be confident that the money is actually being put towards maintaining and improving the browser.
I want Firefox to succeed, I just... can't justify it.
I wonder if they'd do better by charging $10 for a compiled binary and distributing it on Linux as an AppImage. I'd be happier to pay for that than send an unrestricted donation to the Mozilla foundation. Normally I frown on unrestricted donations, but something seems really off over there.
wow what an achievement. Vivaldi which has 1% of there budget had that feature for almost 10 years. Despite almost half a billion dollar budget almost all there good UI changes come years late being the last to add them for example profile management.
It is honestly embarrassing to compare Mozilla to companies like brave that actually created a private ecosystem without subsidization from there competitors.
Right, Mozilla was actually first on the block with this. And even when they removed it it was available as an extension, because their extension ecosystem was capable of UI-level changes.
