> doing something about [the massive web of surveillance] is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla
> we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
You know what's user-hostile? Doing things without the user's knowledge or consent. The new tab page of Firefox after an update often advertises features of the release Mozilla sees important (their VPN offering, Firefox on mobile, etc.). This time the new tab page told me nothing about this change. Communicating it to me was "free" and they still actively refused to do it.
"Doing something" about surveillance starts with transparency but if Mozilla's leadership doesn't see this as important they have no place leading such a company. Mozilla doesn't seem to wrap its head around the fact that their users use Firefox because they don't want the same kind of shady tactics Google or Microsoft keep pulling, they don't want their browser control to be handed over to some guy in a board room who needs a PR team to give a lengthy non-answer to the problem.
I see a lot of words spent on why they came up with this technology but barely a mention about the biggest issue here especially from a company that presents itself as a champion of user rights: they pushed the change in the dead of night and took an actively hostile decision in the users' names by enabling a clearly controversial setting without any warning or communication.
> we should have communicated more on this one
This kind of PR speak for "we actively kept it hidden" is the best way to alienate the users who investigated and chose this browser for a reason.
> we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
You know what's user-hostile? Doing things without the user's knowledge or consent. The new tab page of Firefox after an update often advertises features of the release Mozilla sees important (their VPN offering, Firefox on mobile, etc.). This time the new tab page told me nothing about this change. Communicating it to me was "free" and they still actively refused to do it.
"Doing something" about surveillance starts with transparency but if Mozilla's leadership doesn't see this as important they have no place leading such a company. Mozilla doesn't seem to wrap its head around the fact that their users use Firefox because they don't want the same kind of shady tactics Google or Microsoft keep pulling, they don't want their browser control to be handed over to some guy in a board room who needs a PR team to give a lengthy non-answer to the problem.
I see a lot of words spent on why they came up with this technology but barely a mention about the biggest issue here especially from a company that presents itself as a champion of user rights: they pushed the change in the dead of night and took an actively hostile decision in the users' names by enabling a clearly controversial setting without any warning or communication.
> we should have communicated more on this one
This kind of PR speak for "we actively kept it hidden" is the best way to alienate the users who investigated and chose this browser for a reason.