@@RenderingUser Because things like Deluxe Paint, AutoCAD, DAW's, etc were never invented before the internet and were too crude for normal people to use ... I think you may need to think on that a bit more.
@@RenderingUser You seem to miss the point. Without telemetry data, you can still watch non-experts try out your software. But you get way more than a bunch of numbers, you are able to have human interactions to understand more on how well it works. But even without this, there are a ton of different IDEs and editors on the market because vim sucks. No one needs telemetry to know this.
useful information if theres a sudden spike of issues from users from right to left language using countries. you know that youve probably broken part of its functionality. thats just an obvious example. it could be useful in other ways as well
@@RenderingUser wouldn't you rather track the OS locale for this? It is less intrusive and gives you better information. Or, simply have it be a field on the bug report.
@@username7763like I said. It's a very simplistic example. Another one I can think of, is assigning users to the nearest server. You WILL need location info for that
@@username7763 like I said. It's a very simplistic example. Another one I can think of, is assigning users to the nearest server. You WILL need location info for that
@@username7763 like I said. It's a very simplistic example. Getting locale is also invasive so it's in the same ballpark. Another one I can think of, is assigning users to the nearest ser ver. You WILL need loc info for that. There are many such use cases
It should be law that every single piece of data that gets sent back to the developer (or anyone really) requires manual confirmation from the user. This would 1) make users aware of the sheer quantity of information that's being asked for, and 2) make companies think thrice before asking for anything.
if telemetry is necessary to make good software, then why so much corporation-backed software has absolutely horrid UX/UI despite tracking even your ubication?
A lot of bad product decisions have been made based off of usage data. People who's job it is to analyze data still make mistakes on misinterpreting results or having biases in the data set. But we expect product managers to somehow figure out what to build from this? I've seen software drop key features with no explanation. Maybe it isn't always because of telemetry but it sure is suspicious.
Telemetry is there to figure out which features you can't live without so they can move them to the most expensive version of the software or make them subscription only. It is there to find out if it's too easy to bypass the parts of the software they want you to spend the most time looking at.
Sometimes managers need data in order to get approvals to do the right thing. So they cherry pick data or grab something that looks convincing no matter if it is right or not. "Our software is unstable and needs some core architectural work", unconvincing! won't do! "Our telemetry data shows how unstable our software is, see this pie chart." Ah, ok, go ahead! It's terrible in a lot of ways, but sometimes the ends really do justify the means.
Yes and no. Intuition is not a replacement for data and vice versa. To make the best product you really do need both good intuition and good data about your users. The issue here isn’t that developers collect data to inform software development. The issues are what kind of data they’re collecting and the methods they’re using to collect it as well as the fact that you now have a bunch of C-suite suits making the decisions at these companies who look at nothing but the data without any regard for context.
IOW, the grey beards knew how to wirie great software before they were grey beards. You are exactly right. It does seem many dont eat their own dog food.
One of the problems is that in the old days behaviour and performance was much more predictable. Software was less complex, data sets were smaller, race conditions were virtually unheard in the old days, few libraries were used thus developers knew virtually ever line of code. Today system sometimes are as predictable as biologic organisms in a complex ecosystem. PS: I"m not a grey beard. I shave ;-)
@@ralfbaechlebut on the other hand, things are easier to write, hardware is much more forgiving, and still we get a lot of bad software, feature drop and so on...
Lunduke you are right. It's a pitty a lot of not so tech savvy Linux users are buying "help the developers to improve their software" and gladly accept telemetry. These users are being mislead. Devs do not need telemetry. For "help-the-devs" a suggestion inbox is best.
It was that poxy animated desktop paperclip advisor in MS office when things started to go wrong. Don't say that telemetry doesn't give you facial expressions, because the next thing it will be mandatory to connect with your neuralink to assess usage.
But if they can't spy on my browser, how will they ever know that "Help>About Firefox", "Edit>Settings", "History>Show All History", "Manage Bookmarks", etc. should end in "..." by basic UI conventions and giving an i-beam mouse cursor when pointing at an unfocused address bar instead of a standard mouse arrow is indicating the action of clicking incorrectly? The only reason why such issues exist is because they don't have enough user data and is in no way a reflection on their development team and their knowledge of standards and common practice.
@@mirror1766 as a web developer I can assure you that web devs don't card about following conventions, constancy, or even accessibility. We are too busy upgrading npm packages and adding marketing's latest branding. Gotta squeeze logos everywhere and add massive amounts of whitespace for the UX!
No, you're leaving out the argument in favor of telemetry: To look at your hardware to see what brands and versions of hardware and drivers the software crashes on. But also, you may have gotten cause and effect backwards for the Firefox usage decline. I think it had a lot to do with out of memory crashes, which happened because Javascript websites became more and more memory-hungry. That's something a browser maker would need to know about. So if the telemetry is just limited to hardware and driver versions and out of memory crashes I don't think people care too much.
Okay, but, you could always report crashes to Mozilla. "Send Error Report" windows would come up when it crashed. That kind of information I don't usually mind sending if it makes sense. Which, is opt-in. Mozilla isn't really in the browser business anymore, they're an ad company that has a web browser. Much like Google, granted, Google keeps trying to sabotage the internet because making the internet worse to use is better for their bottom line with ads that are blatant spam/lies and lead users to malware sites and downloads. And if the creators of Firefox somehow couldn't notice memory related issues with javascript, I'd think they're not doing their testing well enough. If there was a crash related to that I'm sure the crash report should be able to generate with such information for you to opt in and send to Mozilla. If the "send error report" button works properly (I've had moments where it doesn't on various operating systems) I will generally use it.
Chrome came in hot focusing in JavaScript performance with the V8 engine. It was faster and more stable than the competitors at launch. It was heavily marketed by Google, and the rest is history.
They don't necessarily need constant access to the data though. They could just rely on crash reports that the user decides to send (and data can stay anonymous), as well as community forum feedback.
@@mozvi1436 Well, Mr. Lunduke knows the users can't be relied on to tell developers anything technical; that's part of my point. As to what access the developers need, I don't care. I'm not arguing in favor of Mozilla, just pointing out Mr. Lunduke unfairly suggested there's no argument at all for getting data directly from the users' computers.
That shareware graphic calculator in Apple OS . . . I think it was 8.1 - 9.2.2 . . . was the best I have ever used! It's too bad the creator stopped issuing licenses to activate the full version, but even the trial mode helped a lot of students visualize and get interested in learning higher maths!
If you work for a company which insists on having telemetry enabled, write a script or program to intentionally inject nonsense, and make sure you run it using a VPN or obfuscate your computer / network data. It's always enjoyable having someone higher up ask: "What is CURL?" or "Links... that's not a browser, is it?".
nobody uses telemetry to make the product better. they collect telemetry because it's free and they can sell it to advertisers. it's like a free real estate lifehack for them.
If you have the hardware and software profile it's almost as good as name and address. That is the main thing they want and if you turn it off they still get it. Also hilarious since these projects never listen to any single criticism no matter what, especially these guys.
The main point they're making, if genuine, is that they're incompetent. Not only they collect telemetry, but also become less relevant due to whatever decisions they make. But of course they're not genuine. _Make Software Great Again!_ (just a fun poke, don't fret :P) The thing is, anyone who genuinely relies on telemetry to make "informed decisions" is actually saying that they don't really know what they're doing, that they don't actually have a solid plan to address certain needs and solve problems that exist in other software. That's quite telling, because normally you're supposed to drive the project forward based on known needs. Mozilla acts like they're user-driven while, actually, baking in feature that are not even user-requested. So yeah, they're full of it.
The European Data Protection Regulation requires that you define the uses of data before collecting it. I translate it as: If you want to do telemetry, first specify how you want to process the incoming data. I guess, most of the data hoarders have no glue how to properly setup and evaluate a statistically sound telemetry based user study.
If telemetry is good, then logically, the programs with the most telemetry should be the best. Oh wait, that's Microsoft Windows. These devs can't name a single piece of software that got good because of telemetry.
This almost makes it sound like Firefox (for example) doesn't even have a real team behind it that actually cares about the project, and it's purely driven by some kind of bureaucratic process that makes "decisions" based on "data" which are then implemented by some random employees that couldn't care less, and at this point you shouldn't expect literally anything significant to ever happen again in its development, just minor tweaks and useless features being added or removed from time to time
Little snitch from objective development is a great piece of software, once you start using it you’ll be alarmed at the amount of network activity that it blocks for applications that have no business phoning home.
If you need unbiased consumer data to improve your product you hire a few researchers and make an unbiased survey / test of the product with your target customers. If you can't find enough customers for those surveys / tests, you give incentives for participation: usually money. Telemetry is not even a good way to collect unbiased data, is also biased data in ways they don't know.
I'm like TELEMETRY should be a launch option that puts it into a log file on the device if it should exist at all. Then if the user wants to upload that the app can do that and tell the user where it will end up..
They legally MUST provide choice. Strictly Necessary data (ie without opt-in) is super narrow in scope and must only be used for the purpose of operating the service, generalized analytics is NOT part of that. They will get into some serious hot water in the EU if they dont respect these principles....
DOOM! NUFF SAID! In all seriousness, look into Madspace To Hell and Beyond, Sonic Robo Blast 2, all the games that were released in the 8, 16 and 32-bit eras. Those console games tried to push the limits of their hardware (sans some of the movie tie-in games) and were rewarded. Nowadays, AAA gets really lazy and is somehow rewarded (cough brand recognition cough).
As a developer if I need any kind of telemetry then it's for a very specialized case. So specialized build used by select users on select systems for a select workload. Or maybe instruct the user to specially configure the system to collect the required data. And never something that delivers data without asking. EVER.
Crash reports are useful if software isn't guaranteed to be non-crashing. Also when sending bug reports, platform details are good. If going to enough large scale, some telemetry may be useful to developers to focus development efforts. Like, if there is tradeoff to optimize something, it can be useful for decision making. These should be anyway optional.
Or maybe they ARE end users, but the feature they need telemetry for ISN'T what they want as end users. Was it Cortana? or having internet included in search function, which you could easily toggle off in the default settings window, but they kept hiding it deeper. I'm going to guess having users use those feature made them (or had the potential to make them) more money. Something you can easily tell via telemetry "did the number of user using those feature increase after the update?", but not something the whole team's behind, making it harder to get more input to improve(?) it internally. I don't think there's 1 reason why they do this (option to sell those data is always there :P), keep scrolling to add to the list "why the **** are they doing this?!"
Mozilla: we need telemetry data to make better software User: Ok. All of us are using RSS feeds Mozilla: we’re gonna delete the RSS feature in Firefox Telemetry my ass.
From my work, we have no telemetry at all, we don't know which of the hundreds of forms or features the end user is using, or not using. Don't know which features can be cut, really wish we had some stats. We can talk with the customer representatives, but they just know broad strokes, not which form.
You said it all, I am just starting my business because the market in general sucks at making software and collecting massive user data. I can easily do better.
They used to be good, now it's slightly less worse than the worst data eating corpo monster. That's the 'alternative; lol. I'm on Librewolf personally, its a bit less trash than Firefox and that's the best you get in the era of enshitification. I'd just go back to Netscape Navigator if i could at this point lol.
Its a cheap lie to grab your data. No you do not need telemetry, there is so many better ways to get user feedback. And also if you do not know your target audience you should not be making software.
Like all good things, once society adopts them and a critical normie threshold is reached. It's only downhill. Just look at the Internet. Same problem.
Yeah, is crazy, every miner learned to code nowadays, no wander that software is so bloated and is worse than a spyware + malware. Even if the processing power increased more than 100x in last 20 years, the software produced today run slower than then, not even the same speed, is slower if you can imagine, and the bloat eat so much RAM that is crazy, a simple window 10 years ago eaten less than 2 MB of RAM, today without 20+MB of RAM you can't run it, only the empty window with simple decoration. Today most of the software is developed by butchers with the hammer. When I talk with other dev's about a piece of software that I want to do strictly what is intended to do to eat strictly necessary resources they look at me like I am an extraterrestrial, I begin to believe that most of the dev's don't know how the PC work, or, there are so many resources currently in a PC that they don't care how they build it, they glue some lib's there and tada, new software, no optimization no nothing. And as a cherry on the cake, there appeared python, the laziest and the most dumb thing that ever existed for developers, even Linux dev's become so lazy that put the slowest and resource intensive code to run in background or at runtime, in my opinion python need to banned from professional applications and reserved only for children's, but not even for them because you develop a generation of lazy developers.
Telemetry seems pretty cool in Balders gate when they shared the percentage of people starting with certain characters or classes or have done something in the story
If you care about your software you will find ways to make it great. It is lazy to include telemetry for the sake of it. How often do companies even use that data to make decisions. Instead, reach out to your customer if you care. Hopefully the customer will care.
Honestly, I understand their perspective. Having data enables them to make more informed decisions, but responding in the way they did is really stupid. It kind of comes off condescending, too. They should've just not responded. I don't even really think its a skill issue either.
They need it to make a buck, that's all "anonymized GDPR data" they can sell.... (for targeted ads, it's full spyware to browsing history practically) many software projects die without the money, or because other software maintainers do whatever they can to make sure old software breaks. If there are good arguments to it I can't find them, but without money software projects forced into obsolescence will die. Personally I hate spyware; and also hate being broke, and hate forced obsolesces (api deprecations, etc, created to sell phones and require no-op update publishing). I think I just hate capitalism, and society at large expects automatic profitability (freemium freeware) instead of paying. I'm passionate about the concept that computers are suppose to just work, and suppose to work for us not against us... but if you look at it most of the top down organizational structures force people and then entire societies to do things rather than allow people to step away and things that aren't broken to keep working. Forcing people to update software for no reason is almost always going to creep a degradation of privacy and monetization of software in.
Ehhh... I can't agree. I don't want tracking forced on anyone, for sure. But to suggest that analytics can't help make informed decisions is frankly foolish. The secret is that you have to be good at making software in order to be good at knowing what instrumentation you need to learn what you want to know. Telemetry won't do it all by itself. But there are issues I've found using analytics that I could never have found through focus groups or spontaneous feedback. The kinds of intermittent irritations that aren't consistent enough to find in QA and aren't devastating enough to trigger a support call can be seen in the metrics if you know what you're looking for. And having that data available when someone DOES call support can make diagnosis so much easier. Companies wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
I frequently get letters about some company that I never heard of has leaked all my information and here is some identity protection as compensation. How well do you trust tech companies to keep telemetry data anonymous and secure? I've worked for tech companies, I sure don't.
Because it'll be used against you 100% of the time, along with EULA scams where you sign away your rights to watch a crappy show or play a broken glitchy preachy game or whatever. That's a big reason to pirate stuff, to avoid signing crooked EULAs. You are the product they sell to data brokers. How 'bout that guy whose wife died at the Disney park but he couldn't sue because he watched Disney+ with a free trial four years prior and clicked the "I Agree" box to do so. But then again most people are absolute morons when it comes to data security, they overshare so much on social media that the telemetry is nothing compared to their followers and every data scraper knowing their every location, thought, mood, what they ate, when they pooped it out, have all their biometrics, pictures of their house keys, and usually have the answer key to their 'security' questions available in their bio and post history if their password isn't just their username with a 1! at the end. (some of you are like "How'd he KNOW OMGZ?!?!" and nervously changing their password right now, to username2@ lol.) But yeah, go ahead and opt in, it's your data, you can be a sucker all you want, but just like you have a choice to walk around with your digital pants around your ankles, the rest of us sane rational individuals should be presented with the option to opt in before using the software. Personally every time i use any software the first thing i do is search settings to make sure i'm opted out? It's because it's like they said, if we don't trick people into giving up their data, hardly anyone does. So that makes you the minority. But then again these days being a fringe minority means companies fall all over themselves to virtue signal and pander to anyone who will kiss ass and lick boots in return.
These companies are no longer interested in pushing good product. They're more interested in ESG and DEI. I knew mozilla was cooked the moment I saw their rainbow branding.
@@Macheako I think the good guys just got pushed out by the big money interests who are mostly idiots with to real skill. Of course once you replace your top company execs with a bunch of ESG/DEI experts they hire their kind of people and push out the truly intelligent ones.
@@Macheako I think the good guys just got pushed out by the big money interests who are mostly airheads with to real skill. Of course once you replace your top company execs with a bunch of ESG/DEI experts they hire their kind of people and push out the truly intelligent ones.
@@RockBrentwood If this happens it's open source working as intended. Soon with AI coding tools and various copilots and AI-IDEs most halfway competent users will be able to roll their own with minimal to no coding, or using block programming or nodes or something. AI can already write fully working browser extensions right now from a simple "write me an adblocker for firefox using Easylist" prompt, and could a year ago when i was playing with that exact thing. It won't be long until everyone could have their own browser with unique codebase or binaries running so no two browsers would be susceptible to the same attack, or at least not enough to make scripts work. That is, if you trust AI not to insert backdoors and hope nobody notices. I'm not saying that's the right solution, but it's the solution we're collectively on track for whether you like it or not. I could see AI serving refactored binaries of 'secure' apps (banking and such) for one time use as a security measure, and every app would be slightly different, making reverse engineering attacks impossible, or more accurately irrelevant as each app served is bespoke binary that's discarded upon closing the app.
That we had great software before the internet proves this point 100%
And without bloat
subjective. a lot of software improved for non power users thanks to telemetry
otherwise everyone here will use vim
no we didnt
@@RenderingUser Because things like Deluxe Paint, AutoCAD, DAW's, etc were never invented before the internet and were too crude for normal people to use ... I think you may need to think on that a bit more.
@@RenderingUser You seem to miss the point. Without telemetry data, you can still watch non-experts try out your software. But you get way more than a bunch of numbers, you are able to have human interactions to understand more on how well it works. But even without this, there are a ton of different IDEs and editors on the market because vim sucks. No one needs telemetry to know this.
Companies should know that customers aren't their QA team.
God forbid the developers use their own app 😂😂
The industry term is bananaware. Software that ripens at the customer.
@@Macheako Sometimes that just isn't an option. I do have a nuke for testing my embedded controller but sadly I'm out of fresh plutonium ;-)
Long-time gamers: "First time?"
The only thing they use the telemetry data for is removing features that only advanced users use.
“We don’t know how to create Software without knowing your location” 🤣🤣🤣
useful information if theres a sudden spike of issues from users from right to left language using countries. you know that youve probably broken part of its functionality. thats just an obvious example. it could be useful in other ways as well
@@RenderingUser wouldn't you rather track the OS locale for this? It is less intrusive and gives you better information. Or, simply have it be a field on the bug report.
@@username7763like I said. It's a very simplistic example. Another one I can think of, is assigning users to the nearest server. You WILL need location info for that
@@username7763 like I said. It's a very simplistic example. Another one I can think of, is assigning users to the nearest server. You WILL need location info for that
@@username7763 like I said. It's a very simplistic example. Getting locale is also invasive so it's in the same ballpark. Another one I can think of, is assigning users to the nearest ser ver.
You WILL need loc info for that. There are many such use cases
It should be law that every single piece of data that gets sent back to the developer (or anyone really) requires manual confirmation from the user. This would 1) make users aware of the sheer quantity of information that's being asked for, and 2) make companies think thrice before asking for anything.
Telemetry data is needed, to sell it on to advertisers and researchers 😅
Bingo. They want to get in on the gold rush just like everybody else.
... and to "researchers".
it's not like they don't know how to use telemetry. they don't collect it to use it, they collect it to sell.
if telemetry is necessary to make good software, then why so much corporation-backed software has absolutely horrid UX/UI despite tracking even your ubication?
A lot of bad product decisions have been made based off of usage data. People who's job it is to analyze data still make mistakes on misinterpreting results or having biases in the data set. But we expect product managers to somehow figure out what to build from this? I've seen software drop key features with no explanation. Maybe it isn't always because of telemetry but it sure is suspicious.
Telemetry is there to figure out which features you can't live without so they can move them to the most expensive version of the software or make them subscription only. It is there to find out if it's too easy to bypass the parts of the software they want you to spend the most time looking at.
If you don't know intuitively what good software looks like you shouldn't be developing software.
I…Kind of agree 😂 (software dev myself)
Sometimes managers need data in order to get approvals to do the right thing. So they cherry pick data or grab something that looks convincing no matter if it is right or not. "Our software is unstable and needs some core architectural work", unconvincing! won't do! "Our telemetry data shows how unstable our software is, see this pie chart." Ah, ok, go ahead! It's terrible in a lot of ways, but sometimes the ends really do justify the means.
Sadly, been in many places where devs cared less about the product. It being a mess perhaps contributed.
Yes and no. Intuition is not a replacement for data and vice versa. To make the best product you really do need both good intuition and good data about your users. The issue here isn’t that developers collect data to inform software development. The issues are what kind of data they’re collecting and the methods they’re using to collect it as well as the fact that you now have a bunch of C-suite suits making the decisions at these companies who look at nothing but the data without any regard for context.
real boomer take right there
IOW, the grey beards knew how to wirie great software before they were grey beards.
You are exactly right. It does seem many dont eat their own dog food.
One of the problems is that in the old days behaviour and performance was much more predictable. Software was less complex, data sets were smaller, race conditions were virtually unheard in the old days, few libraries were used thus developers knew virtually ever line of code. Today system sometimes are as predictable as biologic organisms in a complex ecosystem.
PS: I"m not a grey beard. I shave ;-)
@@ralfbaechlebut on the other hand, things are easier to write, hardware is much more forgiving, and still we get a lot of bad software, feature drop and so on...
Lunduke you are right.
It's a pitty a lot of not so tech savvy Linux users are buying "help the developers to improve their software" and gladly accept telemetry. These users are being mislead. Devs do not need telemetry. For "help-the-devs" a suggestion inbox is best.
It was that poxy animated desktop paperclip advisor in MS office when things started to go wrong.
Don't say that telemetry doesn't give you facial expressions, because the next thing it will be mandatory to connect with your neuralink to assess usage.
But if they can't spy on my browser, how will they ever know that "Help>About Firefox", "Edit>Settings", "History>Show All History", "Manage Bookmarks", etc. should end in "..." by basic UI conventions and giving an i-beam mouse cursor when pointing at an unfocused address bar instead of a standard mouse arrow is indicating the action of clicking incorrectly? The only reason why such issues exist is because they don't have enough user data and is in no way a reflection on their development team and their knowledge of standards and common practice.
@@mirror1766 as a web developer I can assure you that web devs don't card about following conventions, constancy, or even accessibility. We are too busy upgrading npm packages and adding marketing's latest branding. Gotta squeeze logos everywhere and add massive amounts of whitespace for the UX!
No, you're leaving out the argument in favor of telemetry:
To look at your hardware to see what brands and versions of hardware and drivers the software crashes on.
But also, you may have gotten cause and effect backwards for the Firefox usage decline.
I think it had a lot to do with out of memory crashes, which happened because Javascript websites became more and more memory-hungry.
That's something a browser maker would need to know about.
So if the telemetry is just limited to hardware and driver versions and out of memory crashes I don't think people care too much.
Okay, but, you could always report crashes to Mozilla. "Send Error Report" windows would come up when it crashed. That kind of information I don't usually mind sending if it makes sense.
Which, is opt-in.
Mozilla isn't really in the browser business anymore, they're an ad company that has a web browser. Much like Google, granted, Google keeps trying to sabotage the internet because making the internet worse to use is better for their bottom line with ads that are blatant spam/lies and lead users to malware sites and downloads.
And if the creators of Firefox somehow couldn't notice memory related issues with javascript, I'd think they're not doing their testing well enough. If there was a crash related to that I'm sure the crash report should be able to generate with such information for you to opt in and send to Mozilla. If the "send error report" button works properly (I've had moments where it doesn't on various operating systems) I will generally use it.
Chrome came in hot focusing in JavaScript performance with the V8 engine. It was faster and more stable than the competitors at launch. It was heavily marketed by Google, and the rest is history.
oh, cool, my reply is shadow banned, even I can't see it. I still got an update when you received a reply though.
They don't necessarily need constant access to the data though. They could just rely on crash reports that the user decides to send (and data can stay anonymous), as well as community forum feedback.
@@mozvi1436 Well, Mr. Lunduke knows the users can't be relied on to tell developers anything technical; that's part of my point.
As to what access the developers need, I don't care. I'm not arguing in favor of Mozilla, just pointing out Mr. Lunduke unfairly suggested there's no argument at all for getting data directly from the users' computers.
Remember when telemetry was sending a postcard?
Shareware authors remember.
That shareware graphic calculator in Apple OS . . . I think it was 8.1 - 9.2.2 . . . was the best I have ever used! It's too bad the creator stopped issuing licenses to activate the full version, but even the trial mode helped a lot of students visualize and get interested in learning higher maths!
If you work for a company which insists on having telemetry enabled, write a script or program to intentionally inject nonsense, and make sure you run it using a VPN or obfuscate your computer / network data. It's always enjoyable having someone higher up ask: "What is CURL?" or "Links... that's not a browser, is it?".
I'm amazed a company is trying to say they tried the software and couldn't find any bugs themselves.
Thank you Bryan. It's a message that a lot of companies need to learn.
That outright proves it was intentional and malicious to make it opt-out. Enjoy a lawsuit or two, Mozilla.
And lawsuit payouts that will have to be bankrolled by Google, because Mozilla now SUCKS as a company and doesn't bring in any money of its own.
This man is absolutely correct
At least 50% of modern software is made by people who never use it or don't care. Windows 11 is probably the worst offender.
Ooooh, we got spicy Lunduke today, and I love it! 🔥😁
nobody uses telemetry to make the product better. they collect telemetry because it's free and they can sell it to advertisers. it's like a free real estate lifehack for them.
If you have the hardware and software profile it's almost as good as name and address. That is the main thing they want and if you turn it off they still get it. Also hilarious since these projects never listen to any single criticism no matter what, especially these guys.
The main point they're making, if genuine, is that they're incompetent. Not only they collect telemetry, but also become less relevant due to whatever decisions they make. But of course they're not genuine.
_Make Software Great Again!_ (just a fun poke, don't fret :P)
The thing is, anyone who genuinely relies on telemetry to make "informed decisions" is actually saying that they don't really know what they're doing, that they don't actually have a solid plan to address certain needs and solve problems that exist in other software. That's quite telling, because normally you're supposed to drive the project forward based on known needs. Mozilla acts like they're user-driven while, actually, baking in feature that are not even user-requested. So yeah, they're full of it.
The European Data Protection Regulation requires that you define the uses of data before collecting it. I translate it as: If you want to do telemetry, first specify how you want to process the incoming data. I guess, most of the data hoarders have no glue how to properly setup and evaluate a statistically sound telemetry based user study.
If telemetry is good, then logically, the programs with the most telemetry should be the best. Oh wait, that's Microsoft Windows. These devs can't name a single piece of software that got good because of telemetry.
This almost makes it sound like Firefox (for example) doesn't even have a real team behind it that actually cares about the project, and it's purely driven by some kind of bureaucratic process that makes "decisions" based on "data" which are then implemented by some random employees that couldn't care less, and at this point you shouldn't expect literally anything significant to ever happen again in its development, just minor tweaks and useless features being added or removed from time to time
this may be the one case where you can replace developers with chatgpt and not notice any difference (edit: not being serious)
Little snitch from objective development is a great piece of software, once you start using it you’ll be alarmed at the amount of network activity that it blocks for applications that have no business phoning home.
Couldn't of said it better myself. It is 100% not necessary.
They mean Mozilla can't become an AI empire without stealing your data.
It won't become an AI Empire, no-way no-how.
What the telemetry gives Mozilla is something it can market to bring in money for HQ raises.
If you need unbiased consumer data to improve your product you hire a few researchers and make an unbiased survey / test of the product with your target customers.
If you can't find enough customers for those surveys / tests, you give incentives for participation: usually money.
Telemetry is not even a good way to collect unbiased data, is also biased data in ways they don't know.
It's called QA testing. New devs are poached straight from the finest minds in Wheelchair School, aren't they?
I'm like TELEMETRY should be a launch option that puts it into a log file on the device if it should exist at all.
Then if the user wants to upload that the app can do that and tell the user where it will end up..
They legally MUST provide choice. Strictly Necessary data (ie without opt-in) is super narrow in scope and must only be used for the purpose of operating the service, generalized analytics is NOT part of that. They will get into some serious hot water in the EU if they dont respect these principles....
DOOM! NUFF SAID! In all seriousness, look into Madspace To Hell and Beyond, Sonic Robo Blast 2, all the games that were released in the 8, 16 and 32-bit eras. Those console games tried to push the limits of their hardware (sans some of the movie tie-in games) and were rewarded. Nowadays, AAA gets really lazy and is somehow rewarded (cough brand recognition cough).
or... just ask the users.
When Adobe Premiere had a pretty horse to look at while you wait haha
its the middle level management worried about getting laid off if they have nothing to show that are driving this
Apparently Recall in the next Windows 11 patch is 100% mandatory. Recall is built into the file explorer. Yeah, no.
As a developer if I need any kind of telemetry then it's for a very specialized case. So specialized build used by select users on select systems for a select workload. Or maybe instruct the user to specially configure the system to collect the required data. And never something that delivers data without asking. EVER.
It's not like these machines have publicly available schematics.
Crash reports are useful if software isn't guaranteed to be non-crashing.
Also when sending bug reports, platform details are good.
If going to enough large scale, some telemetry may be useful to developers to focus development efforts. Like, if there is tradeoff to optimize something, it can be useful for decision making.
These should be anyway optional.
@@gruntaxeman3740 nothing wrong with allowing a user to collect and send you logs. But this isn't what people mean by telemetry.
"Voluntary? It wouldn't work for me."
That's what the snuggle-struggle-inclined people would say.
Windows ME was made without any telemetry data.
As was XP ❤
And they are so popular today.
Or maybe they ARE end users, but the feature they need telemetry for ISN'T what they want as end users.
Was it Cortana? or having internet included in search function, which you could easily toggle off in the default settings window, but they kept hiding it deeper.
I'm going to guess having users use those feature made them (or had the potential to make them) more money.
Something you can easily tell via telemetry "did the number of user using those feature increase after the update?", but not something the whole team's behind, making it harder to get more input to improve(?) it internally.
I don't think there's 1 reason why they do this (option to sell those data is always there :P), keep scrolling to add to the list "why the **** are they doing this?!"
Mozilla: we need telemetry data to make better software
User: Ok. All of us are using RSS feeds
Mozilla: we’re gonna delete the RSS feature in Firefox
Telemetry my ass.
Telemetry tells you how people are using it.
Taking human feedback and self indulging in your own work tells you what makes it better.
From my work, we have no telemetry at all, we don't know which of the hundreds of forms or features the end user is using, or not using. Don't know which features can be cut, really wish we had some stats. We can talk with the customer representatives, but they just know broad strokes, not which form.
just keep a feedback form or email inbox.
Firefox didn't decline because of telemetry, it declined because of Chrome.
You said it all, I am just starting my business because the market in general sucks at making software and collecting massive user data. I can easily do better.
What about seamonkey, is it still ok? Lets go back to when the internet was good.
Soo..... my flashlight apk shouldn't be sharing my location data?
Non consent bug reports, that's where we're at with the 'privacy respecting' alternative.
Telemetry is an excuse for poor design and QA.
Time for humans to use software made by humans.
Controversial opinion: mozilla isn't any better than google or microsoft, they're just the underdog
Absolutely agree
They used to be good, now it's slightly less worse than the worst data eating corpo monster. That's the 'alternative; lol. I'm on Librewolf personally, its a bit less trash than Firefox and that's the best you get in the era of enshitification. I'd just go back to Netscape Navigator if i could at this point lol.
Not controversial really. The difference here stems from that we believed Mozilla was good. Not anymore.
@@mbozhilov "Don't be evil" - right?
I still try to target win2k! (Agreed, peak Windows!)
Are the telemetry data stored in the repository, so every developer can make 'informed decisions'?
Its a cheap lie to grab your data.
No you do not need telemetry, there is so many better ways to get user feedback. And also if you do not know your target audience you should not be making software.
Microsoft Windows is the definitive proof that good software has nothing to do with it.
How "good" do they want Firefox to be, exactly? Literally all they have to do is not be Chromium and be happy
Hahaha telemetry tells them people use adblockers - which is why Google is implementing more ways to block browser-level adblockers in Chrome
Like all good things, once society adopts them and a critical normie threshold is reached. It's only downhill. Just look at the Internet. Same problem.
I agree with this. It's very disingenuous.
Thunderbird devs can't make tray icon in Linux work for 20+ years. What telemetry these clowns need to finally fix it? Betterbird did it btw.
It's easy to tell you have never worked on widely used software...test boy
Truly great software died alongside physical media.
Yeah, is crazy, every miner learned to code nowadays, no wander that software is so bloated and is worse than a spyware + malware.
Even if the processing power increased more than 100x in last 20 years, the software produced today run slower than then, not even the same speed, is slower if you can imagine, and the bloat eat so much RAM that is crazy, a simple window 10 years ago eaten less than 2 MB of RAM, today without 20+MB of RAM you can't run it, only the empty window with simple decoration.
Today most of the software is developed by butchers with the hammer.
When I talk with other dev's about a piece of software that I want to do strictly what is intended to do to eat strictly necessary resources they look at me like I am an extraterrestrial, I begin to believe that most of the dev's don't know how the PC work, or, there are so many resources currently in a PC that they don't care how they build it, they glue some lib's there and tada, new software, no optimization no nothing.
And as a cherry on the cake, there appeared python, the laziest and the most dumb thing that ever existed for developers, even Linux dev's become so lazy that put the slowest and resource intensive code to run in background or at runtime, in my opinion python need to banned from professional applications and reserved only for children's, but not even for them because you develop a generation of lazy developers.
Tutorial on how to make a 3 minute video into 25 minutes by talking the same thing in circles… gg… achievement unlocked…
Sorry but... The thumbnail makes it look like your nose is attached to your glasses, Groucho?
Telemetry seems pretty cool in Balders gate when they shared the percentage of people starting with certain characters or classes or have done something in the story
Fork it!
If you care about your software you will find ways to make it great. It is lazy to include telemetry for the sake of it. How often do companies even use that data to make decisions. Instead, reach out to your customer if you care. Hopefully the customer will care.
mommy?
Honestly, I understand their perspective. Having data enables them to make more informed decisions, but responding in the way they did is really stupid. It kind of comes off condescending, too. They should've just not responded.
I don't even really think its a skill issue either.
They need it to make a buck, that's all "anonymized GDPR data" they can sell.... (for targeted ads, it's full spyware to browsing history practically) many software projects die without the money, or because other software maintainers do whatever they can to make sure old software breaks. If there are good arguments to it I can't find them, but without money software projects forced into obsolescence will die. Personally I hate spyware; and also hate being broke, and hate forced obsolesces (api deprecations, etc, created to sell phones and require no-op update publishing). I think I just hate capitalism, and society at large expects automatic profitability (freemium freeware) instead of paying.
I'm passionate about the concept that computers are suppose to just work, and suppose to work for us not against us... but if you look at it most of the top down organizational structures force people and then entire societies to do things rather than allow people to step away and things that aren't broken to keep working. Forcing people to update software for no reason is almost always going to creep a degradation of privacy and monetization of software in.
Ehhh... I can't agree. I don't want tracking forced on anyone, for sure. But to suggest that analytics can't help make informed decisions is frankly foolish. The secret is that you have to be good at making software in order to be good at knowing what instrumentation you need to learn what you want to know. Telemetry won't do it all by itself. But there are issues I've found using analytics that I could never have found through focus groups or spontaneous feedback. The kinds of intermittent irritations that aren't consistent enough to find in QA and aren't devastating enough to trigger a support call can be seen in the metrics if you know what you're looking for. And having that data available when someone DOES call support can make diagnosis so much easier.
Companies wouldn't do it if it didn't work.
Of course you don't, but if you wanna make a buck......
Ok... but why are people so afraid of telemetry?? i always opt in... why are people so afraid?
"uuuuh my data my data!!" LOL
Why do you NEED to know what I think to create a Good Product?
I’ll just make it myself ❤
I frequently get letters about some company that I never heard of has leaked all my information and here is some identity protection as compensation. How well do you trust tech companies to keep telemetry data anonymous and secure? I've worked for tech companies, I sure don't.
Because it'll be used against you 100% of the time, along with EULA scams where you sign away your rights to watch a crappy show or play a broken glitchy preachy game or whatever. That's a big reason to pirate stuff, to avoid signing crooked EULAs. You are the product they sell to data brokers. How 'bout that guy whose wife died at the Disney park but he couldn't sue because he watched Disney+ with a free trial four years prior and clicked the "I Agree" box to do so.
But then again most people are absolute morons when it comes to data security, they overshare so much on social media that the telemetry is nothing compared to their followers and every data scraper knowing their every location, thought, mood, what they ate, when they pooped it out, have all their biometrics, pictures of their house keys, and usually have the answer key to their 'security' questions available in their bio and post history if their password isn't just their username with a 1! at the end. (some of you are like "How'd he KNOW OMGZ?!?!" and nervously changing their password right now, to username2@ lol.)
But yeah, go ahead and opt in, it's your data, you can be a sucker all you want, but just like you have a choice to walk around with your digital pants around your ankles, the rest of us sane rational individuals should be presented with the option to opt in before using the software.
Personally every time i use any software the first thing i do is search settings to make sure i'm opted out? It's because it's like they said, if we don't trick people into giving up their data, hardly anyone does. So that makes you the minority. But then again these days being a fringe minority means companies fall all over themselves to virtue signal and pander to anyone who will kiss ass and lick boots in return.
These companies are no longer interested in pushing good product. They're more interested in ESG and DEI. I knew mozilla was cooked the moment I saw their rainbow branding.
Sad too 😢 they used to be the Good Guys
@@Macheako I think the good guys just got pushed out by the big money interests who are mostly idiots with to real skill. Of course once you replace your top company execs with a bunch of ESG/DEI experts they hire their kind of people and push out the truly intelligent ones.
@@Macheako I think the good guys just got pushed out by the big money interests who are mostly airheads with to real skill. Of course once you replace your top company execs with a bunch of ESG/DEI experts they hire their kind of people and push out the truly intelligent ones.
They need that data so they can 'own the Chuds' or something.
@@RockBrentwood If this happens it's open source working as intended. Soon with AI coding tools and various copilots and AI-IDEs most halfway competent users will be able to roll their own with minimal to no coding, or using block programming or nodes or something. AI can already write fully working browser extensions right now from a simple "write me an adblocker for firefox using Easylist" prompt, and could a year ago when i was playing with that exact thing. It won't be long until everyone could have their own browser with unique codebase or binaries running so no two browsers would be susceptible to the same attack, or at least not enough to make scripts work. That is, if you trust AI not to insert backdoors and hope nobody notices.
I'm not saying that's the right solution, but it's the solution we're collectively on track for whether you like it or not. I could see AI serving refactored binaries of 'secure' apps (banking and such) for one time use as a security measure, and every app would be slightly different, making reverse engineering attacks impossible, or more accurately irrelevant as each app served is bespoke binary that's discarded upon closing the app.
i have a solution. delete and not use mozilla software at all