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Tracking usersUser tracking is always contentious. There are real advantages to gathering lots of information on how an application is used, but there are also serious drawbacks in terms of privacy. Many applications or distributions have "opt-in" mechanisms that report back, but that makes the data somewhat suspect because it comes from a self-selected group. But "opt-out" data gathering is frowned upon by privacy advocates and privacy-conscious users. As a recent discussion in the Mozilla dev-planning group shows, though, there are some who find that the need for data may outweigh some privacy concerns. Mozilla is understandably concerned with Firefox's decline in market share and would like to try to determine what the underlying causes are. That has led to a proposal for a feature called MetricsDataPing that would collect a wide variety of information about the browser, its add-ons, and how it is used. That information would be sent to Mozilla over HTTPS each day that the browser is used. Crucially, the proposal is that MetricsDataPing would be an opt-out feature, which would require users to know about the feature and disable it if they didn't want to share that data. This stands in contrast to features like Telemetry, which gathers data on browser performance, but it has two crucial differences from MetricsDataPing. First, it is opt-in so that users actively have to enable it, and secondly, it tries to avoid gathering any personally identifiable information (PII). It does not store IP addresses (but does geolocate the IP address and store that) and it generates a new ID every time the browser is restarted. MetricsDataPing on the other hand would gather a much wider range of information such that "fingerprinting" a user just based on the data gathered would be a real possibility. Just a list of add-ons installed is probably nearly unique, but adding in just the installation date for the add-on, as MetricsDataPing does, would almost certainly make it unique. Information about search sources used, number of searches done, and that sort of thing also rings alarm bells for those concerned about privacy. It also uses a "document ID" to identify the data sent to the server, which would allow users to delete their data from the Mozilla servers. But the document ID could also essentially serve as a unique user ID (UUID) because the previous document ID is always sent with the current update, so that the older can be deleted. There are efforts to anonymize the data that would be stored, but, as we have seen before, it is very difficult to truly anonymize collected data. Some of that is also true for Telemetry, because it has added fingerprintable data after its initial roll-out, but the key difference is that users have willingly chosen to share that data. That's the main difficulty that some see with the MetricsDataPing proposal. Benjamin Smedberg started off the discussion with a posting of his concerns:
It seems as if we are saying that since we already collect most of this
data via various product features, that makes it ok to also collect this
data in a central place and attach an ID to it. Or, that because we *need*
this data in order to make the product better, it's ok to collect it. This
makes me intensely uncomfortable. At this point I think we'd be better off
either collecting only the data which cannot be used to track individual
installs, or not implementing this feature at all.
But others, especially on the Mozilla metrics team, believe that the information gathered is critical. Blake Cutler described it this way:
The Metrics Data Ping is an attempt to apply scientific principles to
product design and development. Mozilla relies too much on gut
decisions, which directly translates to poor product decisions.
Firefox analytics are stuck in the dark ages. It shows.
Ben Bucksch made several suggestions on how to improve the privacy of the data gathered, but he is also worried that gathering data to figure out why Firefox usage is declining will actually result in more users leaving because of a perception that the browser is intruding on their privacy. While the data may be important and useful, there are other considerations according to Justin Lebar:
Yeah, it sucks that we can't tell why people stop using Firefox. But
our [principles] are more important than that.
To that end, the discussion shouldn't center on why these metrics are important or difficult to obtain another way. The discussion is about whether we can at once collect the proposed metrics and stay true to our values. If we can't, then we can't collect the data, no matter how important it may be. There was some discussion of technical measures to try to reduce the PII content of the messages, but there are still problems with things like fingerprinting. If you gather enough information (of the kind the metrics team thinks it needs), you are very likely to be able to track users. Even if the data is massaged in some fashion (aggregated for example), the perception of privacy invasion will still be present as Boris Zbarsky pointed out:
One problem is that some people will assume that if data is being sent then
it's being used, no matter what we actually do with it and say we do with
it. So if we _can_ design things such that we couldn't misuse them even if
we were to want to, we should. I understand that in general this is pretty
difficult....
Even for opt-in services like Telemetry, gathering additional information requires user agreement. When the list of add-ons was added to the information that Telemetry supplied, users were required to opt back in to Telemetry after being informed of that change. As Lebar noted: "So again, here we have a decision made about sending the list of add-ons in a ping-type thing, that we cannot do it without explicit permission, even for people who already opted in to data collection." But MetricsDataPing would, seemingly, gather that information without asking the user even once. Early in the thread, Mike Beltzner pointed to a posting on the Mozilla privacy blog that committed Mozilla "to a basic policy of 'no surprises, real choices, sensible settings, limited data, and user control'", he said. It's a bit hard to see how MetricsDataPing fits into that framework. For some Linux distributions (which is probably not really where Mozilla is focused on market share) it could easily be seen as a misfeature that should be removed from the code—though that might lead to more "iceweasels" due to Mozilla trademark issues. In the end, Mozilla may need to find a way to satisfy its data needs with an opt-in feature, or find a very convincing argument for the impossibility of user tracking with the data it does collect. There is also the argument that there is a subtle self-unselection bias that is introduced with an opt-out feature. In what ways does the data get skewed by eliminating the very privacy-conscious? It is certainly understandable that the metrics team (and Mozilla as a whole) wants the data, but, like Linux distributions it may have to settle for indirect measurements or some self-selection bias. (Log in to post comments)
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 2:09 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] > Yeah, it sucks that we can't tell why people stop using Firefox. Um, I'll tell you why I stopped using Firefox - because 3D-accelerated graphics applications don't work after running FF (version 6 or greater, IIRC). I have to restart X after every time I run FF if I want to have functioning 3D apps. I believe it has something to do with WebGL or HTML5 or some graphics feature, but I can't be bothered to figure it out when Google Chrome doesn't have this issue. Disclosure: I'm using the NVidia proprietary graphics driver (and you all can take me out back and beat the crap out of me later for doing so), but I believe using the Nouveau driver has the same issue. GeForce 6200 chipset on an old AGP 8x card, FWIW.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 2:49 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Sounds like a bug, please report it.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 8:50 UTC (Thu) by zlynx (subscriber, #2285) [Link]
It sounds like a bug in his 3D drivers that Firefox should blacklist and then just ignore.
Tracking users Posted Feb 17, 2012 1:18 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
That does not sound like the right way to go about things. Much better would be to report the bug in the graphics drivers so that it gets fixed.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 10:04 UTC (Thu) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]
This also happened to me: some flash applets would draw outside of the browser window, and sometimes even corrupt the desktop background; then, any other application that displayed complex graphics would render part of the dead flash applet. And I was using NVidia proprietary drivers, too.
But this is something from the past, it just stopped happening after some update I cannot remember; you might want to give it another try.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 2:50 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
Bah, that Etherpad link requires cookies. Get off my lawn!
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 3:34 UTC (Thu) by ringerc (subscriber, #3071) [Link]
I ditched Firefox when a better alternative (Chrome) became available, one that:
- Avoids memory fragmentation problems in long-running sessions by using one process per tab;
When my girlfriend's PC could no longer handle Firefox on a mere 3GB of RAM I persuaded her to try Chrome, despite the loss of useful add-ons, and she has zero interest in going back now.
If Firefox can offer a compellingly better alternative to Chrome in terms of performance and security while offering better privacy options, I'm all there. Right now, on the technical level there's no contest.
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 4:02 UTC (Thu) by nteon (subscriber, #53899) [Link]
for me Chrome's 'killer feature' is shift-ctrl-n to open up an incognito window. Its super useful to be able to open up a new window where you can browse to any site cookie-free within seconds.
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 8:04 UTC (Thu) by Klavs (subscriber, #10563) [Link]
didn't know about that feature - thanks :)
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 9:37 UTC (Thu) by fb (subscriber, #53265) [Link]
> for me Chrome's 'killer feature' is shift-ctrl-n to open up an incognito window. Its super useful to be able to open up a new window where you can browse to any site cookie-free within seconds.
FWIW, Firefox has "start private browsing" Ctrl-Shift-P (quite an old feature AFAIK).
I used Chrome exclusively for a while but went back to Firefox when I realized that it had IMO a killer feature against any other browser: the HTTPS-Everywhere plugin.
Ctrl-Shit-P doesn't compare to Ctrl-Shift-N Posted Feb 9, 2012 10:37 UTC (Thu) by mchouque (subscriber, #62087) [Link]
> FWIW, Firefox has "start private browsing" Ctrl-Shift-P (quite an old feature AFAIK).
Ctrl-Shit-P doesn't compare to Ctrl-Shift-N because in Chrome/Chromium it doesn't replace your window while with Firefox it does...
So with Chrome you can have both private and and non private at the same time.
I run both Posted Feb 9, 2012 11:21 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]
I run both Chromium (day-to-day) and Firefox (start in private browsing mode, AdBlock, NoScript, Proxy) mainly for this reason. I don't find switching between the two too much of a chore and Firefox has been making gains in the performance stakes for some time. I still prefer Chromium's developer tools over Firebug though.
On another note I've now got to make the choice between Firefox and Chrome on my phone. At the moment I think Firefox is the nicer mobile browser but it's good to have the competition. It also wins points fpr being fully open source.
I run both Posted Feb 9, 2012 20:19 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I've used Firefox for a while (Incredible and now the Galaxy Nexus) and I've switched to Chrome on the phone after just a few hours of testing it out. Some pros/cons of each (on the Galaxy Nexus):
Firefox Pros:
Firefox Cons:
Chrome Pros:
Chrome Cons:
Overall, Chrome is much nicer because Firefox dies from the "1000 papercuts" effect. Both browsers need a "save for later" option that is more permanent than a tab and less permanent than bookmarks. Another app for this feature feels…unwarranted.
I run both Posted Feb 10, 2012 15:59 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Check out the reworked Firerox for Android when it comes out in a few weeks, it will be pretty interesting and fast. Aurora and Nightly development builds are available already.
Firefox for Android Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:02 UTC (Fri) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]
I get my Firefox from the excellent f-droid repo (http://f-droid.org/). Perhaps it would be worth submitting the appropriate meta-data magic to make it easier to distribute the nightlies? Otherwise I assume it's a manual load of the APK with adb?
Firefox for Android Posted Feb 11, 2012 18:22 UTC (Sat) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Our release team submits Beta and final release builds to the Android market, not sure if there are any plans to go for the F-Droid repo as well. We also have APKs available that can be installed directly from our website and receive updates through our own update check mechanism.
There's new Aurora and Nightly builds every day, I'm not sure how well that works with any market or repo, so I think http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/channel/#aurora/auro... and http://nightly.mozilla.org/ are probably the better variants to get them. Note that those builds are still heavily under development.
I run both Posted Feb 10, 2012 23:21 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
I installed Aurora on my Incredible, and it is indeed more slick. Unfortunately, synchronization still requires a desktop instance to mediate. I'll try it out more on the Nexus tonight.
I run both Posted Feb 20, 2012 18:05 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]
Is it possible for Aurora to use the central Android certificate store? I use CAcert.org for my personal site and I imported the root certificates into my phones. Chrome is happy, but Firefox complains about it not trusing the connection. Also, after adding exceptions, I see no way to manage them other than clearing all of Aurora's data.
I run both Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:02 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
The integrated developer tools in Firefox that are already in 10 and still being vastly improved in updoming versions do look pretty interesting from what I can tell. Make sure to try the from time to time!
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 10:21 UTC (Thu) by viiru (subscriber, #53129) [Link]
Agreed, for Firefox vs Chrome the insane memory leaks are the main disadvantage and the addons are the main advantage.
I'm still using Firefox, but on my (slightly older) laptop I'm rather close to migrating to Chrome out of necesity. One gig of ram simply isn't enough anymore, and Firefox needs to be manually garbage collected (restarted and the session restored) every five hours or so. My workstation has 4 gigs of memory and needs a GC every two or three days, so it's still usable.
So as a slight hint to Mozilla: you don't need to collect any user data, you need to fix the damned memory leaks!
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 14:23 UTC (Thu) by pdewacht (subscriber, #47633) [Link]
I have the complete opposite experience: I find (recent versions of) Firefox much more economical with RAM than Chromium. I tried using Chromium for a while and it required about 50-150 megabyte per tab. With Firefox I often have two dozen or so tabs open, and Chromium can't handle that on my 2GB laptop without swapping.
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 9, 2012 19:13 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
between firefox ~6 and firefox ~11 the memory use has been cut about in half for me (and continues to get better with each release)
if you haven't looked at the firefox memory usage recently, check again, you may be surprised.
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 11, 2012 21:18 UTC (Sat) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
Did you happen to try starting your Firefox profile over from scratch the way you did when you tried out Chrome?
As far as privacy options go, do you use Chrome to search Google or use any other Google services while signed in to your Google account? Do you have the default configuration of allowing the omnibar to perform searches and autocomplete? Do you have the malware/fishing detection enabled?
If you do any of these things, then Google is either using your account information or a unique cookie to track your interaction with their services and products.
They are pretty good about being explicit about what they do, and getting more explicit with their privacy policy revamps, but it is still significantly more personal data than most people realize during their daily activity.
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 22, 2012 16:17 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>Did you happen to try starting your Firefox profile over from scratch the way you did when you tried out Chrome?
I think you've hit upon one of the reasons to migrate from Firefox to Chrome.
I've been using Chrome for a couple of years now (I think it was shortly after they implemented extension support), and I've *never* had to mess about with my profile. With Firefox (and I've barely used it in a couple of years, so this might no longer be a problem) I had to clear my profile every now and then as upgrades tended to break things, especially in the presence of extensions.
With Chrome, I can install an addon and be pretty certain that it will continue to work, and it will automatically be installed and configured in exactly the same way on any other machine which I set to sync with my profile. In this sense, add-ons become as dependable as a core part of the browser, whereas the situation with Firefox is - to put it politely - less than pleasant.
IIUC this is a current area of improvement for Firefox, so hopefully by this time next year it should be solved - but why would I bother to switch back?
(FWIW I actually did jump through the hoops required to run an official Firefox build on Linux a few weeks back. Ignoring the fact that those hoops are not a minor issue, as I recall there were two reasons I decided it was inadequate:
Because it's a memory-hogging monster? Posted Feb 22, 2012 21:37 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
to be fair to firefox, a large part of this problem is the extenstions.
Firefox allows extenstions to change anything in the browser, this allows for some good things (for example, why the firefox addblock is so much better than anything available for chrome), but it also means that mistakes in the extensions can cause more grief.
"no opt" and real people Posted Feb 9, 2012 5:27 UTC (Thu) by dberkholz (subscriber, #23346) [Link]
There's always the other possibility. Force people to choose one option or the other, with no default, before they're able to proceed.
On another note, "real people" like the vast majority of Firefox's users frankly don't care at all about privacy unless it's ridiculously intrusive. Most of them are probably on Facebook, sharing intensely personal information there.
Personal info does not necessarily reveal the beast inside you Posted Feb 9, 2012 9:46 UTC (Thu) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
It's one thing to share personal info or photos, but another to share which sites you visited.
Personal info does not necessarily reveal the beast inside you Posted Feb 9, 2012 11:40 UTC (Thu) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]
But those people already share which websites they visited. At least those that have some kind of like button.
Personal info does not necessarily reveal the beast inside you Posted Feb 9, 2012 22:26 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Most people share what sites they visited by
the ads on the pages.
Now if you aren't one of those people, be happy.. you are only being tracked by any friends who mention/picture/share you while doing those things.
Personal info does not necessarily reveal the beast inside you Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:08 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Nobody at Mozilla is considering sharing sites you visted with us - that would be ridiculous for an organization with our principles.
That said, Chrome AFAIK does that and even shares every character you type in the location bar with Google, they say it's to improve the search results you get there.
Personal info does not necessarily reveal the beast inside you Posted Feb 22, 2012 15:29 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]
>That said, Chrome AFAIK does that and even shares every character you type in the location bar with Google
You mean in order to perform incremental search, they have to send the search data to the search engine? *Gasp* Evil!
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 8:06 UTC (Thu) by Klavs (subscriber, #10563) [Link]
I still prefer Firefox, mainly because it can have RSS feeds as "bookmarks folders" in the topbar - so they are easily accessible - I haven't found this feature in chrome.
However I've been seriously tempted to switch to chrome, because firefox crashes with java and large flash sites - and while it's most definetely a problem with java(webbanking in my case) and flash - chrome doesn't crash entirely - just the window it's running in. It's pretty annoying to have to restart firefox, because one window crashed.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 8:15 UTC (Thu) by Fowl (subscriber, #65667) [Link] Is this with a current version of Firefox? Plugins have been out of process since 3.6.something.
Tracking users Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:10 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Please go to about:crashes and inform me of a recent crash report you sent on this. Then we'll be able to track this down some more.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 10:23 UTC (Thu) by etienne (subscriber, #25256) [Link]
I wonder if users would better accept to use a respectable third party, i.e. whatever data big-software-company want to collect (even detailed and identifying) is encrypted by the third party public key before being sent to a computer owned by the third party, and this (one man) company would tranfer encrypted files to a computer not linked to Internet for decryption and analysis requested by big-software-company, returning to big-software-company only statistical results.
Maybe even this thrid party would not run a limited responsability company, so you could go to court if it mis-behaves. A bit like a medecine doctor or a layer. IMHO the problem is that you cannot know what big-software-company will do with the data they collect, and the user agreement needs to be very broad to use complex software, but that does not need to be the case for identifying data they collect.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 16:00 UTC (Thu) by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492) [Link]
Under such a scenario now you have to trust two parties with your information. One of those companies (here) business is web browsers, and the other one is data. I doubt that MozCorp will fuck around with my personal information, but I'm 100% confident any and all third parties would do so.
Tracking users Posted Feb 10, 2012 23:42 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] One of those companies' (here) business is web browsers, and the other one's is data. I doubt that MozCorp will fuck around with my personal information, but I'm 100% confident any and all third parties would do so. So cynical! The other one's business is privacy. Or don't you believe ethics are possible? Do you trust an escrow company to hold your money when you buy a house? Do you trust an audit company to tell you how much money the company you own took in last year (the business world has depended pretty heavily on that trust for a long time, even though the audit company is hired by the auditee). I note that the suggestion even supposes that the privacy company have only one employee, to avoid the potential dilution of ethics that happens in big organizations.
Tracking users Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:23 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Well, Mozilla is no big-software-company but a non-profit dedicated to openness and opportunities for people on the web. Does that make you feel better?
How would it help? Posted Feb 9, 2012 12:22 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
How would this gathered data help in understanding the declining market share?
How would it help? Posted Feb 9, 2012 17:55 UTC (Thu) by scripter (subscriber, #2654) [Link]
I'd like to know how it well help as well. Measure the wrong things, and people will come to the wrong conclusions.
I don't see how they can measure the conversations people have, where one person recommends chrome to another.
Mozilla needs to reverse the now-outdated perception that Firefox is slow. Firefox has improved significantly since Chrome made its splash.
On the Linux desktop side, the perception problem may stem from using enterprise distributions where a Firefox 3.6 package is still the standard.
How would it help? Posted Feb 12, 2012 16:28 UTC (Sun) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
If we have this data from installations and we can detect when data has stopped coming in from one of those installations, we can review the configuration, usage, performance, and stability characteristics of those abandoned installations. This is called retention analytics. You can use it to answer questions such as the following:
What was the breakdown of abandoned installations by age of installation? Were they installed, used, and abandoned or were they used for a long time before being abandoned?
Part of the problem right now is that we have a very limited understanding of the composition of installations that contributes to our active install-base. We don't know what portions are regularly and actively used, and what portion might be installed by webdevs for occasional compatibility testing. There are a lot more possibilities than those two, but they help demonstrate how we could be trying to solve the wrong problem if we don't understand the situation.
Do certain add-ons or groups of add-on contribute to abandoned installations?
It is likely that there are certain add-ons that provide such a practical value to large portions of our user-base that those installations are less likely to be abandoned.
What are the performance and stability characteristics of abandoned vs active installations?
Users who abandon installations likely have some good reason. There are some reasons we could never hope to understand such as a friend encouraging them to try out an alternative, but the more we do understand, the better we can focus on improving Firefox in those areas.
How would it help? Posted Feb 13, 2012 21:31 UTC (Mon) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]
According to https://wiki.mozilla.org/Enterprise/Firefox/ExtendedSuppo... version 10 will be the next release with a longer¹ support period. So the more stable distros will very probably pick up that.
¹ One year still seems pretty short to me.
How would it help? Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:27 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
Presumly by analyzing the data drops of people who have not left any newer data drop, i.e. where we can assume they moved to a different browser. Just my guess though, for details you'd need to ask the metrics team.
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 9, 2012 13:06 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
I've probably tried every browser invented by man and I always return to Mozilla.
I have tried using Chrom{e,ium} several times but I now fire it up only on occasion if I find a single page/site on which I need to do something outside my whitelisted sandbox. Ironically I find that the performance of Chrome is just too awful compared to Firefox; with Chrome memory usage starts lower but becomes pathological with a large number of tabs, and similarly I start to see weird CPU spikes and major UI lag as I approach 100 tabs. Firefox became more and more unusable over long sessions with a lot of tabs (e.g. >300) in older versions but over the last year has gotten quite a lot better, and its low-tab-count behavior has gotten closer to Chrome.
Chrome's attempt to minimize browser UI and maximize space given over to the web page, a trend which has been followed by IE and Firefox, leads to clunky unusability. In the other browsers I don't have much recourse, but Firefox lets me fix it out of the box. With Chrome and other browsers you need extensions to help make sense of more than about 30 tabs at once, but Firefox has several built in features that make this a breeze: tab pinning, tab groups, and switch-to-tab in the location bar. And then there are the extensions! NoScript, RequestPolicy, FlashBlock, Calomel, ShareMeNot. All essential to secure, safe browsing, more so than any 'privacy' mode.
The major thing that has frustrated me with Firefox is its performance. You can never be too responsive! It just so happens that for my uses all the other options suck more, but for most people they don't. For light browsing Chrome is faster and more responsive; for heavy users Firefox is still the only serious option.
I think that the Mozilla folks shouldn't be too worried about collecting usage metrics, it's speed and the perception of speed which are needed to remain competitive. The only other data you really need is to know which extensions are popular, but you can figure that out from download statistics almost as well.
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 9, 2012 17:44 UTC (Thu) by yokem_55 (subscriber, #10498) [Link]
300 Tabs? I tend to think your use case is well outside the mainstream....
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 9, 2012 17:47 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Serious use just needs serious system. On my desktop with 16 cores and 32GB of RAM Chromium flies even with 300 tabs. Now, if I need 2000 tabs…, yes Firefox is better here, but I think I only ever needed this once for the last year.
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 10, 2012 12:59 UTC (Fri) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
Don't you find physically managing so many tabs problematic in Chromium?
The UI stalling behavior doesn't seem to be dependant on hitting RAM or CPU bottlenecks, since when it happens I still have idle and under-used cores, and ram is not close to full. As I understand it, Chrome stops giving you "one tab per process" once you pass a certain number of tabs and I'm guessing that's where the problem comes from.
My test system is smaller than yours: 8 cores and 8G RAM, but that ought to be sufficient out to at least 100 tabs.
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 10, 2012 13:52 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I rarely keep them all in one window. It's easy to move tabs around in Chrome thus I group them in windows thematically and then spread windows over virtual desktops.
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 14, 2012 13:28 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
That explains your success. When I say 100 tabs, I mean per window. Tab title width becomes useless in chrome very quickly, though there are extensions which can make it behave like Firefox.
Why I didn't stop using Firefox Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:31 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
You will be happy to hear that Mozilla is making a special effort recently to improve responsiveness - internally code-named "project snappy" - and we hope to see results of that hit in the next couple of releases.
Tracking users Posted Feb 9, 2012 16:26 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (subscriber, #74652) [Link] Yeah, it sucks that we can't tell why people stop using Firefox.Have you noticed Google promoting Chrome on the first page? used to show that on awful browsers like IE, and it was to benefit the users to show them other better options, for users who did not know about them. Now it is used for their own agenda! I use Firefox and do participate in MetricsDataPing while at work. I wish Firefox remains the most relevant, otherwise oen may not know how many days until Chrome abandons ABP and other liberating add-ons.
Tracking users Posted Feb 10, 2012 3:20 UTC (Fri) by cmccabe (subscriber, #60281) [Link]
I'll go back to Firefox once they get serious about sandboxing their HTML rendering code. Until that point, their popularity just makes them more risky.
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 10, 2012 10:16 UTC (Fri) by KotH (subscriber, #4660) [Link]
Am i the only one who wonders why one would gather data on the users of Product A to figure out why people migrate from product A to products B,C,D? I mean, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to gather data on products B,C and D to figure out why people use those instead of A?
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 10, 2012 16:37 UTC (Fri) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
If you tell us how Mozilla can easily gather representative performance, etc. data on Chrome, MSIE, and Safari users, I'm sure the metrics team will be interested. But it's a bit hard to ask users of other products to opt in to your product's improvement program...
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 11, 2012 0:05 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] I don't see how data only on the competitor would be any more use than data only on Firefox. Ideally, you'd want both, but with that not possible, data on just Firefox is pretty good too.The question of why people are leaving Firefox just boils down to why people don't like Firefox, and the imagination runs wild thinking about ways these metrics would help answer that question. About the most basic thing I can think of: if stats show half of the features you have developed are never used, you can assume that's part of why users leave Firefox. Competitors, who have market intelligence, are spending all their development money on features users want and Firefox is spending 50% of it on features they don't. Or, over time, you see most of Firefox's decline is in uses on old computers. So maybe it's because the competitors are more backward compatible. Or maybe it's harder to install on a new computer.
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 13, 2012 11:07 UTC (Mon) by KotH (subscriber, #4660) [Link]
Gathering data and running statistical tools over it will not give you the understanding you seek. You will be just crunching numbers and find things which can be explained somehow... but how do you know that this is actually what is happening? Or to put it short: Corelation does not imply causality!
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 13, 2012 11:04 UTC (Mon) by KotH (subscriber, #4660) [Link]
There is an old and tried method for this: It's called market research. There are many companies that offer services in this field. Yes, it costs money, but a well devised market research will give you a lot better understanding of what is going on in the browser market than gathering some random numbers from people without understanding what those people are actually doing and why.
I'm actually horrified by the thought that an organisation dedicated to openess is considering gathering person related data without asking the people first instead of considering other ways... Not to talk about that such behaviour is illegal in most european countries (you are not allowed to gather person related information without prior consent and have to declare exactly what data is collected, when, who has access to it and how long it is stored)
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 15, 2012 16:51 UTC (Wed) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
I'm not sure that market research could tell us which SQL queries are running long, or which addons are commonly installed by people who are more than one standard deviation above average memory usage, or...
Asking users to describe the performance problems they see is one thing. Working out which bits of the code are _causing_ that is something you need built-in metrics for.
How not to figure out why people use alternatives Posted Feb 15, 2012 18:31 UTC (Wed) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
This proposal is not about collecting person related information. It was built from the ground up to avoid personal information. It has technical features such as using a constantly changing document identifier as well as policy features such as explicitly ensuring that the IP address and previous document IDs are not linked into the data. It provides a very clear view of the data that is collected, to the extent it even provides a tool to allow an interested user to review the data and discover potential problems or useful performance or stability characteristics about their installation locally. It also provides a means for a user to delete the information about their installation from our servers if they choose, and both the client code and the server code is available as open source.
Tracking users Posted Feb 11, 2012 8:34 UTC (Sat) by gb (subscriber, #58328) [Link]
Whole story about 'dark ages' and gathering data seem strange. How does all this should help to determine why people exiting ff?
It's quite obvious why people leaving firefox. In former days, on linux it was simple choice: ff or nothing (until opera appeared, but many linux users prefer familiar open product over closed). After some development inside linux world, ff got pretty good shape. It were just like light for windows users after internet explorer, add wow-factor (wow this is internet without all that annoyances) so user base grown on steroids. This changed the world. But now situation is different - MS started thinking about users (after loosing their 90% market share), google made excellent chrome (which is also open), so people are just have choice and they spreading over good choices. It would be mistake to pay privacy trying to do something with it.
I guess, if firefox position critically needs some information, it's better to ask community 'guys you were using ff so long, help us please - tell why your collegues/friends switched off firefox and why', i guess you'll get all information required.
Also, I think ff users are not equal in terms of browser usage, so if you start fulfill needs of 90% of users only, but they really don't care about your product next day.
Of course all this valid only of declared goal of this matches actual goal.
Intention about dark ages is terrific also.
Tracking users vs collecting product usage data Posted Feb 12, 2012 16:29 UTC (Sun) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
The MetricsDataPing (MDP) project proposal is not intended to be "user tracking". If you look through the data, you see that it does not attempt to identify users, nor does it track private information such as sites visited, search terms used or bookmarked links. A lot of the discussion so far has been focused on whether the data could be subverted to somehow identify and track users, but the proposal is specifically designed to avoid user identification or tracking and the proposal includes policy and features that make it as difficult as is reasonably possible for user identification or tracking to happen.
When contrasted to Telemetry, it is reasonable to point out the difference between opt-out and opt-in, and also the fact that Telemetry contains transient snapshot data while MDP is focused on recording longitudinal data to be able to look at the trends in performance, stability, and usage over time. Both projects work very hard to avoid collecting PII, both projects explicitly avoid recording IP address with the stored data, and both projects take steps to ensure that the IP address found in web access logs cannot be reasonably linked to the data that is stored. I am familiar with this similarity because the metrics team built and supports the back-end infrastructure that supports Telemetry, and the MDP proposal uses the same back-end.
Both MDP and Telemetry contain various bits of information in them that are fairly constant and unique from installation to installation. This means that they are both likely to be "fingerprintable". Such fingerprinting could possibly be used in the place of the document identifier strategy in MDP, but it would not be as reliable, it would not enable users to remove the data about their installation if they wished, and it could be argued that using fingerprinting would just be trying to hide the project's intentions.
To me, one of the most important parts of the debate currently taking place on the planning forum is whether it is acceptable to collect any data using an opt-out mechanism and rely on privacy policy to restrict how that data can be used. That answer is difficult to agree on, especially when the data is critical to the organization as well as directly beneficial to the end-user.
Tracking users vs collecting product usage data Posted Feb 15, 2012 16:53 UTC (Wed) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]
"To me, one of the most important parts of the debate currently taking place on the planning forum is whether it is acceptable to collect any data using an opt-out mechanism and rely on privacy policy to restrict how that data can be used."
When you put it that way, I can see that this is an important question - and, as a participant in the discussion, I'm not sure that it's sufficiently come to the surface. Perhaps it would make sense to start a new thread focussing just on that?
Tracking users vs collecting product usage data Posted Feb 15, 2012 18:20 UTC (Wed) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
I think that might be a good approach, but the most important answers in the Mozilla side of the discussion wouldn't be coming from the metrics team but rather the privacy team.
Features and benefits for end-users Posted Feb 12, 2012 16:30 UTC (Sun) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
One of the pieces of MDP that was a critical requirement during the development of the proposal was the user facing features. We wanted the project to make it easy for the user to see the precise data that was being collected and to be able to gain benefit from that data themselves. The cumulative usage data is stored locally in the installation's profile directory, and that data can be used by interested users through the about:metrics page to learn a number of things about their own usage and the stability and performance of the installation. They can ask questions such as precisely how much the new version they installed last week improved performance or stability for them or whether the add-on that they updated fixed the startup lag they were seeing since they installed it, and they could even discover potentially interesting patterns in how they use the browser throughout the week.
If enough of data to be representative of the majority of our community is submitted to Mozilla, and that data is made publicly available as aggregates, then end-users could also ask questions such as whether the set of add-ons they have installed cause problems for many others or be able to see how much better in terms of stability or performance the next version of Firefox is likely going to be for themselves. Even if no data is sent to Mozilla, I really hope that the local data is still collected and made available through about:metrics because it could really help users understand and fix problems.
Tracking users Posted Feb 12, 2012 19:20 UTC (Sun) by gezza (subscriber, #40700) [Link]
Implementing this "misfeature" would be my number 1 reason to change.
It is a step so far in the wrong direction that even the discussion makes me uneasy.
What happens when a fascist government demands access to all this data, as it is gathered? Best not even to have the ability to gather the data.
Tracking users Posted Feb 14, 2012 20:06 UTC (Tue) by deinspanjer (guest, #82864) [Link]
@gezza
Which pieces of data in particular are you concerned about?
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 4:31 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]
I've stuck with FF during the last few years, despite some faults.
They fact that they are having this conversation demonstrates why.
I bet no such consideration of user privacy would happen at Google/Chrome. And even if it did, some manager would make the final decision and the bottom line would always win.
Mozilla cares about it's mission more than the bottom line. And the mission is an open web for the benefit of us all.
Having said that I think they dropped the ball by letting their interactive performance suffer.
It's only in the last 6 months that MemShrink has come about and made great strides. Project Snappy is only just starting up. They pinned their hopes on project electrolysis for far too long avoiding fixing the glaring problems.
It's not been hard (until recently) to get FF to the point where it needs a restart daily to be usable. Or to get lags in the main UI thread/chrome.
What's the point of a fast JS engine if the singled threaded UI is laggy (waiting on I/O or locks)? Benchmarks eh.
They wasted time on fluff like Panorama and Personas while the crowd was flocking to Chrome for the basics.
The reputation for being slow and bloated will be hard to shake.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 9:45 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] Mozilla cares about it's mission more than the bottom line. Surprisingly enough so does Google. They just have different missions. Mozilla's mission is to promote openness, innovation and opportunity on the web. Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Both are quite serious and are always ready to sacrifice bottom line if it jeopardizes core mission. But inherent difference in missions makes the decision considerations quite different.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 13:28 UTC (Thu) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
I would be careful when comparing "missions" that way.
As a for-profit corporation, Google by law has an obligation to provide the best possible profit to its shareholders, the "mission" you cite can merely be a tool for that for some time and has to be bent as far as possible or even broken when it has only a slight conflict with making profit for shareholders.
As a non-profit foundation, Mozilla by law has an obligation to stick by its mission or lose its status. There's no possibility to bend or break it and still comply with laws.
Therefore, I would not take Google's "mission" as much more than marketing but Mozilla's as a ground rule.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 15:44 UTC (Thu) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]
Actually, Google is by law required to do what their shareholders say. If their shareholders say "this is your mission, keeping it is more important than quarterly profits", then that is what they have to do, and breaking it or even bending it slightly will send the directors and CEO to prison.
That said, I have no clue what the Google shareholders have ordered the Google board and CEO to do, I just want to point out that "corporation" does not necessarily equals "we'll do anything if we profit from it".
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 17:11 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] If their shareholders say "this is your mission, keeping it is more important than quarterly profits", then that is what they have to do, and breaking it or even bending it slightly will send the directors and CEO to prison. Well, not exactly. Breaking? Sure, that's serious offence. Bending it? Happens all the time. Of course in this particular case situation is slightly different. That said, I have no clue what the Google shareholders have ordered the Google board and CEO to do, I just want to point out that "corporation" does not necessarily equals "we'll do anything if we profit from it". Well, you guess is as good as mine but you should remember that over 50% of votes belong to just two shareholders: Brin and Page. This will not be true forever, obviously, but for a few more years it'll be very hard to convince shareholders to abandon Google's core mission.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 15:48 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] As a for-profit corporation, Google by law has an obligation to provide the best possible profit to its shareholders, the "mission" you cite can merely be a tool for that for some time and has to be bent as far as possible or even broken when it has only a slight conflict with making profit for shareholders. Citation needed™. If you talk about a fiduciary duty then note that it does not say that for-profit corporation should pump it's own stock as much as possible (to help speculators). Rather it says that "people in charge" should work on maximizing profits in principle. And if the core asset of your corporation is goodwill related to your core mission then you'll need enormous bottom line hit before you'll be able to force any changes contrary to said mission. As a non-profit foundation, Mozilla by law has an obligation to stick by its mission or lose its status. There's no possibility to bend or break it and still comply with laws. Of course there is! Without money or mindshare it's harder to follow on your mission and that means that you can easily justify small sacrifices for the greater good (precisely what we are discussing here, after all). The are full specter of possibilities between Even shooting your father was business not personal, Sonny! and I have to finish what I started, even if I'm forced to do it alone! - and levels of dedication to the core mission in Google's and Mozilla's cases are closer then you think despite different legal status.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 18:49 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
even if the responsibility is to maximise profits, nothing in that says that it's to maximise _short_term_ profits. In fact, frequently things that maximise short term profits hurt you in the long term.
goodwill is one of those things that sacrificing for short term profits will hurt you in the long term.
In any case, the mission of a public company is not to make profits, it's to do whatever the company charter says the company does.
If the company charter says that the mission of the company is to break-even or produce a modest profit while producing the most public good, then the company is not a non-profit, but at the same time, if the company directors start making decisions to maximise profits they are working against the company charter and are in violation of the law.
Yes, some companies have their charter say that they are in business to make as much money as they can, but that's not all companies. In google's case there is the famous "Do no Evil" statement, and while there can be disagreement on exactly what that means, one thing that it clearly DOES mean is that google doesn't prioritise making money over every other consideration, and if any company directors started doing so, they are breaking the law.
Tracking users Posted Feb 16, 2012 11:34 UTC (Thu) by etiennez (guest, #53056) [Link]
> They wasted time on fluff like Panorama and Personas while the crowd was flocking to Chrome for the basics.
"People" seems to like Personas very much and I doubt it divert that many resources from the basics.
I happen to like Panorama, but yes, it was very strange to spend, apparently, lot of time to implement and QA this feature that almost nobody knows or cares about to the core while removing classical Feed button because not enough people click on it.
Usage data is not the problem! Posted Feb 17, 2012 10:09 UTC (Fri) by job (guest, #670) [Link]
Dear Mozilla people, if you believe what you need is more data, that is a sure sign your organization is rotten with group-think.
It is trivial to get the data you need: Try it yourself. Chrome is more responsive. The user interface is a lot more no-nonsense. Chrome is to Firefox like Firefox was to Navigator.
Firefox became bloated along the way. Nothing was done to combat the obvious memory leaks while more features were added. After the awesome bar and the new history mechanism startups became very slow. The browser was reskinned for every release as this was thought to please Windows users. No one wanted to fix the old issues which was brought up again and again.
You don't have to believe me. Try it yourself. Or read any forum on the Internet where users bascially reinforce their beliefs against one another. I know that the memory usage situation improved significantly over the last few releases, but habits are inertia. Had these improvements been made years ago you would not be in the situation today. Instead these problems were defensively belittled until no one reported them anymore.
Chrome had to be the better browser in order to get users to switch and recommend it to others. Now Firefox must be better than Chrome in order to do the same thing. That will not be easy, and your best hope is for Chrome to deviate from its chosen path and for you to play the community card right. The first step would be to listen to your users, keep improving the memory situation and generally stay on top of things.
Security! Security! Security! Posted Feb 24, 2012 18:42 UTC (Fri) by eric.rannaud (guest, #44292) [Link]
For me, ditching Firefox for Chrome is all about security.
Parsing untrusted JPEG and PNG files from the web within a process that has full access to my whole personal account is simply insane.
Installing add-ons with full read-write access to my $HOME? Insane.
Running flash, or worse, Java on untrusted content with full $USER rights? Insane. (Plugins are now out-of-process but are their privileges actually lowered?)
Sandbox Firefox and, maybe, maybe, we'll come back.
Security! Security! Security! Posted Feb 26, 2012 21:35 UTC (Sun) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] > For me, ditching Firefox for Chrome is all about security. How about Chrome removing OCSP checks for certificates? Apparently Chrome developers think speed is more important than security. > Running flash, or worse, Java on untrusted content with full $USER rights? Insane. Chrome doesn't sandbox plugins either -- since plugins are third-party software and need to access resources that Chrome doesn't know about, such as Flash local storage, webcam and whatnot.
> Sandbox Firefox and, maybe, maybe, we'll come back. Sadly project "Electrolysis" has been frozen for the time being since it requires major modifications to the core and would break most extensions.
Security! Security! Security! Posted Feb 27, 2012 9:04 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] How about Chrome removing OCSP checks for certificates? Apparently Chrome developers think speed is more important than security. Interesting. You assume that OCSP is more secure then simple autoupdateable revocation list. Care to share the proof that it's indeed so? AFAICS Chrome's new scheme is much simpler and thus more robust - this means it's probably more secure, too. Note that the very same article you link to deride raises important practical security concerns related to OCSP thus "it's so obvious that OCSP is better" just does not cut it: not only you should explain how will Firefox solve OCSP-related problems outlined in the article, you should explain what's unsecure in new Chrome's scheme, too. Soft-fail revocation checks are like a seat-belt that snaps when you crash (which is how OCSP is practically implemented in all browsers) does not inspire a lot of confidence. Chrome doesn't sandbox plugins either -- since plugins are third-party software and need to access resources that Chrome doesn't know about, such as Flash local storage, webcam and whatnot. Flash is actually sandboxed and Java plugin is at least checked for known-vulnerable versions - which is better then what Firefox is doing. If you want to point to real problems with Chrome's security - then be my guest, let's talk about it, noone is perfect, but if your goal is just to spread FUD then please stop.
Security! Security! Security! Posted Feb 27, 2012 14:24 UTC (Mon) by KaiRo (subscriber, #1987) [Link]
As already stated, both OCSP and CRLs have the problem of not working when requests to those services are blocked, so they're actually bad solutions. We need to do better in terms of certificates/keys for encrypted communications (I'm not sure the word "secure" is even correct for those), and both OCSP and CRL are not good answers to CA breaches. One possible proposal for this is being described at https://kuix.de/mecai/
On the other topic, sandboxing is IMHO hyped more than it's actually useful. It's one reasonable idea of how to possibly prevent exploits from going worse, but 1) if you (in theory) don't have exploits in the first place, it's useless, and 2) there's lot of security/privacy-relevant flaws where it has no effect at all, esp. in the area surrounding XSS. Also see http://hackademix.net/2012/02/16/sandboxes-are-overrated-... and stuff linked from there.
Security! Security! Security! Posted Feb 27, 2012 15:42 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] 1) if you (in theory) don't have exploits in the first place, it's useless Sure, if your browser and OS are written by infallible God and if it's run on the impeccable computer which is created by said God then you can ignore any and all security practices. In our universe compartmentalization is the only solution worth discussing. It predates computers by several millennia (think military and state secrets, different levels of access, etc) and is the only tied and true [albeit imperfect] solution. 2) there's lot of security/privacy-relevant flaws where it has no effect at all, esp. in the area surrounding XSS Let me translate "discovery" from geek to English: Sensation, sensation! Everything you ever knew is wrong! Yeah, right. If you really believe that then I have very nice bridge to sell.
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