Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way
I can do a quick summary of what&#x27;s being proposed and why.  I work in the JS team at Mozilla and deal directly with the problems caused by insufficient data.  Please note that I&#x27;m speaking for myself here, and not on behalf of Mozilla as a whole.<p>Tracking down regressions, crashes, and perf issues without good telemetry about how often it&#x27;s happening and in what context.  Issues that might have otherwise taken a few days to resolve with good info, become multi-week efforts at reproduction-of-the-issue with little information.<p>It simply boils down to the fact that we can&#x27;t build a better browser without good information on how it&#x27;s behaving in the wild.<p>That&#x27;s the pain point anyway.  Mozilla&#x27;s general mission, however, makes it very difficult to collect detailed data - user privacy is paramount.  So we have two major issues that conflict: the need to get better information about how the product is serving users, and the need for users to be secure in their browsing habits.<p>We also know from history that benevolent intent is not that significant. Organizations change, and intents change, and data that&#x27;s collected now with good intent can be used with bad intent in the future.  So we need to be careful about whatever compromise we choose, to ensure that a change of intent in the future doesn&#x27;t compromise our original guarantees to the user.<p>This is a proposed compromise that is being floated.  Don&#x27;t collect URLs, but only top-level+1 domains (e.g. images.google.com), and associate information with that.  That lets us know broadly what sites we are seeing problems on, hopefully without compromising the user&#x27;s privacy too much.  Also, the information associated with the site is performance data: the time spent by the longest garbage-collection, paint janks.<p>This is a difficult compromise to make, which is why I assume it took so long for Mozilla to come around to proposing this.  These public outreaches are almost always the last stage of a length internal discussion on whether proposals fit within our mission or not.<p>I&#x27;m not directly involved in this proposal, but I personally think it&#x27;s necessary, and strikes a reasonable balance between the privacy-for-users and actionable-information-for-developers requirements.