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Mozilla Turns Firefox Away from Open Source, Towards Spyware: Firefox Labs Now Requires Data Collection (www.quippd.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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TL;DR: Mozilla is now enforcing data collection as a pre-requisite to access new features in Firefox Labs. This is backed by the Terms of Use that Mozilla introduced a few months ago.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (3 children)

That kind of makes sense? Aren't the labs when they're A/B testing or benchmarking new features before general release and toggle random people's settings doing so? I vaguely recall some drama around that.

If I turn off telemetry I want those off too, it makes sense they're linked. It you want a new feature there's always nightly+about:config, but I don't want it downloading random config toggles especially if it's not reporting back that it broke my stuff. The code should be what I installed, not some random lab blob downloaded off their servers at runtime.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

That kind of makes sense? Aren't the labs when they're A/B testing or benchmarking new features before general release and toggle random people's settings doing so?

Per the article, the A/B testing rollout already exists in Studies:

Mozilla introduced studies as “controlled A/B tests built right into Firefox” and they “allow us to compare proposed changes to the default experience in Firefox for small, representative, populations before shipping those changes to everyone.”

I have no detailed knowledge on any of this, so I don't know how accurate the article really is.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

like literally the point of firefox labs is to work with mozilla to get feedback on possible future features.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

IIRC they used labs for "ads" in the past, so disabling labs was already recommended, now it's just double recommended.