A year or so ago, they started sending telemetry letting them know that you have telemetry disabled! [0]
That one pissed me off, just on principle.
I'm not sure exactly what's happened in the last 10 years or so but, at some point, everyone apparently just decided it was okay to start spying on their users (read: "telemetry"). Mozilla and some others, at least, allow you to "opt out" -- although you should never have to! -- as if that somehow makes it okay.
Then, a while back, they decided they were going to go ahead and send in some "telemetry" even if the user has explicitly disabled telemetry!
I can easily remember a time -- and it wasn't that long ago! -- when slipping in even the slightest hint of "telemetry" without a clear, explicit "opt-in" from the user would have been absolutely unheard of.
Mozilla doesn't have much of a user base left. You'd think they would try to avoid alienating us and pissing us off.
---
On a related note -- and with the above in mind -- I recently (within the last several days) started working on my own .js "preferences" to lock Firefox down as much as I can. I've just posted it [1] if anyone is interested (a lot of it was taken from [2]).
Disclaimer: it's very much still a work-in-progress, likely breaks things that I haven't noticed yet, and almost certainly is not what you want to use. I'm fairly happy with it at the moment, however. (There's a bunch of "notes to self" in there that I tried to remove; if I missed any, please just ignore them!)
That one pissed me off, just on principle.
I'm not sure exactly what's happened in the last 10 years or so but, at some point, everyone apparently just decided it was okay to start spying on their users (read: "telemetry"). Mozilla and some others, at least, allow you to "opt out" -- although you should never have to! -- as if that somehow makes it okay.
Then, a while back, they decided they were going to go ahead and send in some "telemetry" even if the user has explicitly disabled telemetry!
I can easily remember a time -- and it wasn't that long ago! -- when slipping in even the slightest hint of "telemetry" without a clear, explicit "opt-in" from the user would have been absolutely unheard of.
Mozilla doesn't have much of a user base left. You'd think they would try to avoid alienating us and pissing us off.
---
On a related note -- and with the above in mind -- I recently (within the last several days) started working on my own .js "preferences" to lock Firefox down as much as I can. I've just posted it [1] if anyone is interested (a lot of it was taken from [2]).
Disclaimer: it's very much still a work-in-progress, likely breaks things that I haven't noticed yet, and almost certainly is not what you want to use. I'm fairly happy with it at the moment, however. (There's a bunch of "notes to self" in there that I tried to remove; if I missed any, please just ignore them!)
[0]: https://blog.mozilla.org/data/2018/08/20/effectively-measuri... (see the "Telemetry Coverage" section)
[1]: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1904354
[2]: https://github.com/pyllyukko/user.js