“Freeing up memory and eliminating unused apps and files” sounds like the kind of bullshit app we have on Android already. Why bring that to PC.

My music library is hosted on my server, automatically synced locally on fixed devices and played from local files most of the time. Streaming services combine the advantage of sometimes disappearing, altering, removing content with the other advantage of needing an active internet connection at all time. That’s neither a good thing nor an efficient thing when the alternative is cheap and works all the time from everywhere.

Of course, I know this is not the most common use case; most people usually don’t care about any of this (and usually complain when something break). But it exists.

You’re conveniently missing the point that there is an actually labeled telemarketing partner that is opt-out. That’s not user habit collection. You’re also missing that “random future studies” should not be auto-enabled by default either. Finally, the topic of this particular post is about categorizing search queries, which as far as they describe it isn’t something your browser should care about.

The only thing that may be legitimate is, as you say, actual UX and feature usage. But for that to be done properly, you have to ask and make it opt-in, as with any data collection scheme. It’s actually a requirement in some places.

The point is, people give shit to chrome because “evil google collects your habits data and monetize them”, while people like you are a-ok with Firefox openly sending data to a third-party marketing partner on opt-out conditions and, as demonstrated by today’s post, adding more collection that have absolutely nothing to do with the behavior of the browser and all to do with user habits.

There’s no “initial button”. Installing Firefox on mobile you’ll have technical data collection, marketing (with a third party) data collection, and “random studies” enabled without a clue. As someone that is very wary of this, I can assure you that at no point I was asked anything about sending data to “Adjust” (marketing partner), Mozilla, or allowing random, unknown at the time, studies.

Collecting usage data and “running some occasional studies” should never be “opt out”, always “opt in”.

A few months ago, I had trouble with Firefox on Android, so I started looking again in the settings; something you really rarely do in a browser. Finding a few things like data collection, usage data, marketing data, and “occasional studies” being all enabled by default sure reminded me that Mozilla isn’t what it used to be.

Hyperloop? The failed project he pushed just to make sure other possible projects that would just work would not be done? Yeah, he was better back then… not.