No offense, Vincent, but your methods don’t work: Firefox Connect has ignored requests like “Add StartPage” for years and uses the platform to announce other search engines getting added instead.

Please don’t dissuade people from using effective methods

This is good news. Mozilla made an ethical mistake, and pushback caused them to correct it rapidly. If anything, this restores my faith in Mozilla at least a little.

I’ve noticed a worrying trend among Firefox fans: too many of them supported this mandatory telemetry for on-device features.

They had never held this position before. Mozilla made a change, and too many fans simply adopted it uncritically.

Personally, I believe everyone should have internal ethical guidelines that aren’t mandated by their favorite corporation. Mozilla’s recent behavior has been particularly egregious because they push an ethical manifesto on their website and they promise every application they produce upholds them. Hopefully it should be clear to people that Mozilla’s stated goals are good because they are good and not simply because they came from Mozilla. If Mozilla updates their principles to suck, then they’ll suck. Ethics should not be treated like a religion.

But this blog post is good news. It demonstrates that criticism actually has merit, and that Mozilla can be coerced into rolling back bad changes.

I hope the Firefox fans who adopted Mozilla’s silent stance just a couple days ago will rethink their positions and decide not to be so harsh when they see criticism of Mozilla.

It’s still up, so nice try.

Are you trying to imply Mozilla gets a free pass for spending two years selling private data to advertisement companies?

https://lemm.ee/post/14474425

Selling your data also makes sense, especially for a company that is in dire straights. That’s what Google did. Since 2023, this is also a Mozilla practice.

I’m just trying to figure out what your ethical bar for Mozilla is.

So your logic would say Mozilla should require all Firefox Beta users to submit to mandatory data collection?

The only consistent through line I see with your reasoning is adherence to what Mozilla preaches from on high. And that concerns me, because Mozilla’s ethics have continued tumbling downwards since they started collecting data at all in 2017.

Up until recently, Labs did not force anyone to submit data to use it.

With your logic, Firefox can also force people to submit data if they use the browser.

it should thus be imperative that you also help with usage data as well

When did you start believing data collection is imperative for on-device functionality that you’ve already got installed?

Good for you. Most people can’t, and being dismissive about this is disturbingly anti-consumer.

The title of the article is extrapolating and rephrasing the statement that Firefox and Mozilla are moving away from the “spirit” of open source. That’s completely different from actually moving away from open source.

This newly mandatory data collection to use certain Firefox features… Do we have the source code for the server?

I am fine with helping Mozilla collect useful data. But I’m also not interested in testing new features before they’re ready, so I’m doubly unaffected by this

Good for you, but since it doesn’t affect you, perhaps you can refrain from extrapolating these preferences onto Mozilla’s poor behavior.

How?

Mozilla fans used to tell me “Stop complaining about data collection, you can just disable it and use the browser.”

Well, now parts of the browser are locked behind mandatory data collection.

This is a workaround to a fundamental problem: You already have the feature installed on your hard drive. It doesn’t require telemetry to run.

So why is Mozilla artificially requiring you to enable it?

I’m not sure, sadly. I tried a bunch of different things but I’m not really a photographer, which is why I’m most interested in a camera that has a decent auto mode first and foremost

While I looked for information, I did discover this webpage describing issues, though, and it sent me down a Lumix DMC-Z___ rabbithole, though. On paper, at least, they look promising. GPS, macro, allegedly good low light, a lot of optical image stabilization?

Just recently, there was a problem with the whole damn web.

I’m looking at the Pen E PL10 now, which looks reasonably priced, if that’s the kind of thing you think would be good. Or better.

See my other reply for my camera woes - I don’t know much of anything about sensor sizes, this is true, but after seeing a digital camera struggle in low or even slightly lower lighting conditions I (think I) want to let in as much light as possible. I’m still not sure how my phone manages to make my photos in the same conditions not look blurry, by some unholy combination of pixel binning, catching light coming back around behind the sensor, AI upscaling, and f incredible optical image stabilization. - Downsides aside, I did notice the digital camera does some interesting depth of field stuff that my phone camera struggles to replicate. Somehow the pictures look more three-dimensional.

I did try one of these, but I noticed that I would end up moving the camera enough for a visible “shake” effect in most pictures I took. And this was outdoors in open areas with plenty of daylight.

Macro photos on it are great, though, and the working GPS was lovely. Shame about not having luck with most else on it. I have no idea how my phone manages to make things look better

Is there a such thing as a recent PEN from OM or Olympus (I’ve actually looked at their stuff, but I’m somewhat confused about which name their cameras get)? I was leaning in their direction, too - I saw tried their camera with a GPS and great macro photography, but I think its sensor is smaller than my phone’s.

(FWIW the OM-D relies on a smartphone for GPS tagging apparently, and I have no idea how that’s handled with an app, especially because the data handoff is whar I’m trying to avoid)

OpenStreetMaps has had decent Android clients, I can’t speak to the state of iOS ones though. If you can pinpoint your destination before departing to it, that’d probably serve you best…

But Google Maps has been hard for me to abandon too

We have demonstrable evidence of Mozilla opening a public forum to solicit user requests in 2022, then ignoring them for about 2 years, then hating the forum to announce Shopping Assistant and Orbit and other now-dead things