[_notreallyme_]

Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that. You can check with chrome, and indeed it behaves like firefox.

For the user hostility, there argument was that people who dislike the new behavior do not have telemetry enabled, and thus they do not deserve to have the features they want. It's quite ironic considering firefox main advantage is their privacy oriented model...

[Yaina]

I don't find it ironic at all. The purpose of telemetry is to be able to obtain information about the user population at large. It's anonymous and the data only flows one way (i.e. you don't see personalized ads based on telemetry data), but of course some data about your browsing behavior is being sent somewhere, yes.

It's a trade-off: You sent some anonymous usage data but in turn that contributes to decisions made about the product. If you opt-out of sending this data, obviously, it does not contribute to the pool of data from which decisions are being made.

Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.

You can't have your cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.

[bscphil]

> Now, that a small group of people with very specific opinions and preferences is the same that disproportionally also opt out of sending telemetry... I don't see how that is Mozilla's problem.

I disagree. If you create a piece of software and develop a userbase that disproportionately opts out of telemetry relative to your software's alternatives, congratulations, you won. You got the power users, the developers, the people who care enough to submit quality bug reports, they're all on your side. Game over.

You don't need telemetry to understand what features these users need because they will tell you - loudly and forcefully - in bug reports filed if you break something. Assuming we're talking about open source software, and we are, they may also be the people sending you patches and improvements for these features.

Telemetry is what you need if you're making a mass market product that meets the needs of 80% of users. It isn't necessary, and in fact may not be useful, if you're developing software designed around the needs of the people contributing to the software. Some software tries to do both. But the way you do that isn't by looking exclusively at telemetry and then pretending that what you see there describes the behavior of all user categories, at least when it comports with the plans of your UX team. It's by listening to the people who are most passionate about the software.

[bigDinosaur]

An idea can be good regardless of telemetry, telemetry is descriptive and not prescriptive. Telemetry is inherently reductive in that sense. You're making a leap of logic that's genuinely unfounded - an idea can be good or bad and this is wholly independent of telemetry unless your only concern is maximising or minimising use of some kind of feature. I would never dismiss an idea because someone has telemetry disabled and it seems like a genuinely disturbing idea to even hold the position that a user with telemetry disabled is lacking value.

[lopkeny12ko]

> Actually their argument was that all other major browsers behaved like that

Yes, I understand, and that's true. But no other native text field behaves like this; only other browsers. In fact, one of the formerly big selling points of Firefox over Chrome for me, at the time, was that in Firefox, interacting with the URL bar didn't select all (read: it behaved like all other GTK text fields). "Making Firefox behave more like Chrome" is an anti-feature when most of your users aren't using Chrome precisely because of asinine behaviors like this.