Studying how Firefox can collect additional data in a privacy-preserving way
I can do a quick summary of what'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'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'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't build a better browser without good information on how it's behaving in the wild.<p>That's the pain point anyway.  Mozilla'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'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't compromise our original guarantees to the user.<p>This is a proposed compromise that is being floated.  Don'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'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'm not directly involved in this proposal, but I personally think it's necessary, and strikes a reasonable balance between the privacy-for-users and actionable-information-for-developers requirements.