Vincent

Thanks, but unfortunately not - I believe those two options just refer to the one remaining bar I still have, with the home button, the address bar, the "tabs" button, and the menu. However, I'm looking for the other toolbar, that had the back/forward buttons and the new tab button. i.e. the bottom toolbar from the first screenshot in the Connect post.

I agree that there's a change in that it's now publicly communicated that it's not an ideal end state to tie Labs to whether telemetry is enabled, but that might just as well have been the case in the first place - just not communicated publicly. (If that is indeed the case, then of course ideally that would have been explicit somewhere immediately, but alas.)

Either log a feature request in Mozilla Connect and otherwise not talk about it on social media, or if you talk about it on social media, start with a "hmm, I wonder why this" attitude, rather than a "Firefox is becoming spyware and no longer open source" one.

What's confusing here is that MDN content is not solely written by Mozilla - see e.g. @openwebdocs@front-end.social. So it's probably not Mozilla saying you need to install this extension.

I think (hope?) I've praised their work elsewhere on other accounts, but no harm in doing it some more: @TheEvilSkeleton@treehouse.systems has been doing heroic work on accessibility (and also a quick shoutout to @nekohayo@mastodon.social for highlighting such work, and for their own contributions).

Unfortunately the accessibility situation can make it hard for people with disabilities to contribute, but I'll also note that it's very hard for people without disabilities to understand, let alone fix, issues with accessibility. So extra props for that.

I'll be sharing this article in the future when I see people trash talking. Hopefully it'll make them reconsider.

It's a bit overwhelming to have half my home page full of them - would've been fun to have a trickle of them spread out over days. But thanks for sharing them, and especially for adding alt text for all of them!

Many support articles are written by volunteers, I believe, which is nothing short of amazing.

Well, what if you think you don't need it later, but you do? I don't trust my own judgement here!

Yeah I just realised that and was going to amend my comment - you're right, that is a difference. Still, "towards spyware" is a bit too strong for my tastes. Not to mention "turns away from open source", given that I don't think the source code for any of these features is hidden or not released under the MPL.

In other words, this:

Mozilla never feature-gated new features behind data collection – simply downloading Firefox Nightly or Beta was enough to try out the newest features in testing.

is incorrect, as downloading Nightly or Beta is opting in to more data collection. See here, where it says:

Nightly is an unstable testing and development platform. By default, Nightly sends data to Mozilla — and sometimes our partners — to help us handle problems and try ideas.

And note that this was already the case before the new ToU, so it's probably unrelated to that.

/cc @yoasif@fedia.io @yoasif@mastodon.social

Edit: although of course the nuance here is that you can optout in Nightly and still use everything.

Firefox Nightly has always had more telemetry enabled by default. The idea isn't that you get exclusive first access to new features; the idea is that you're helping test future feature to make sure they're ready for a proper release. That includes helping Mozilla learn what works well.

If you don't want that, you can always wait for the feature to be released as normal, after it has benefited from testing by users who were open to informing its development.