As @denschub@schub.social always emphasises: make sure to file a report at https://webcompat.com!
We ask everyone to file their reports, because all reports are really useful. Even if we don’t respond to every single thing you report, it’s a signal that we’re processing in many different ways. (…) please, keep reporting all issues you see, because every single blip counts!
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1de7bu1/comment/l8ghtr2/
Was also asked about and answered in the recent AMA on reddit:
Unfortunately I have the same symptoms you do… On GNOME.
It doesn’t always happen, but every now and then the system will get into a state that suspend doesn’t work.
It means that on systems with apps installed written with libadwaita, will also have libadwaita installed, rather than just GTK. But those apps will look like GNOME apps, which might look out of place on e.g. a Windows or Xfce desktop.
Yep, see https://relay.firefox.com/faq/#phone-masking-faq-question-how-many.
(Unfortunately, phone numbers are expensive, whereas email addresses are not.)
It’s VoIP-based, so yes, there are acceptance issues. Also good to be aware of: as opposed to the email masking, you get just a single phone number (more would be too expensive).
Still, kinda wish I could use it here outside the US.
It’s a known issue: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1851083
There’s somewhat of a workaround there, but hopefully it’ll just get resolved properly soon.
Haha I appreciate the candor!
Seems like a bit of an overreaction. From what I can see, it’s mostly that Ubuntu don’t seem confident enough to ship this without more rigorous testing (i.e. they think it might introduce other/more severe bugs), so they want resume doing that testing before shipping it. Doesn’t really seem harmful to anyone that didn’t explicitly choose to use Ubuntu.
If it works anything like Firefox Translations does, the model is only downloaded on-demand, so it wouldn’t affect your browser usage if you don’t use the feature.
What if the AI doesn’t activate unless you explicitly choose to do so?
You could try Menu -> Help -> Troubleshoot Mode. That will restart Firefox without extensions and such - if the problem then disappears, it’s probably caused by one of them.
there’s no user behaviour tracking
I mean, that depends on how you define user behaviour. It tracks which packages are frequently installed, for example, or how often people install Ubuntu in the first place. All of which I think is pretty legit, in my opinion, since that only involves aggregate user statistics that help prioritise work and detect common problems - but that’s essentially what Firefox is doing too.
Debian is a great example of relatively commonly used free software that doesn’t really collect data btw.
I think there’s multiple specifications at this point. There’s Chrome describing what they’re doing unilaterally, and then there’s the WebExtension working group that’s trying to get alignment among several browsers.
including limiting lots of things that worsen the experience for AdBlock Users
That is the Chrome implementation; Firefox doesn’t and won’t impose those limits.
Hmm, so what user-facing free software is at Firefox’s scale? I think Ubuntu has telemetry, for example (though I think they even have fewer users).
I believe there was an experiment making weather data more accessible through the URL bar, e.g. when people start searching for weather there, which could be useful. Presumably, telemetry like this can help determine which of such features to prioritise.
I could indeed also imagine ads, but then not based on keeping a file on you with all your interests and sharing that with advertisers, but by locally choosing between a couple of categories of ads and showing the ones that are related to your current search, without anyone having to know what you’re actually searching for.
I support anonymous telemetry collected by a small non-profit that helps protect our freedom. Not big tech.
It’s on the roadmap, though I imagine doing it properly is going to take a while - the test build was very rough, just to verify whether it was even realistic.