Firefox 21 ships with performance-profiling Health Report The Mozilla Foundation has shipped the latest version of its Firefox web browser with a new Health Report feature that monitors browser behavior and optionally submits usage statistics back to Mozilla to help reduce crashes and other problems. According to a blog post by VP of Firefox engineering Johnathan Nightingale, the …
Yes, Firefox is getting slower and slower. I ran some benchmarks earlier this year and found that each new version of Firefox takes more and more memory and CPU.
The fastest version of Firefox is 3.2.28. I have it installed on some old underpowered laptops and it runs great.
Sorry but there really should've been a pop-up on upgrade to get explicit permission to submit any data to anybody. Whether it'd be anonymized or not.
I'm glad I saw this news article but I know for a fact many won't and many will not want to share any data what-so-ever.
Bad move Mozilla. Bad move. I'm surprised everybody's just "ok" with this.
@Rukario I already switched from Canonical's Ubuntu back to Debian because of Canonical's increasing commercialisation of Ubuntu and with it, Unity's search "feature" which is arguably worst than this breach by Mozilla, but still, I can't help but think they're going down the same path soon with Firefox OS and all.
@AC 05:44 I've never actually used Canonical's Ubuntu, always been a Kubuntu user just because of my dislike of Gnome (that goes back to the Slackware 3 days). Needless to say in a year's time, if the next LTS of Kubuntu goes the Unity way, I'll be going elsewhere.
But worse yet, they've changed the icon location! They're now in /usr/lb/firefox/browser/chrome/icons/default for those of us who just have to have Tails in the top left of our browser windows!
" stats about the browser's operation, such as how long it took to start up, how long it has been running, and how often it crashed."
None of which would be interesting if it started quickly and didn't crash.
Upgraded yesterday, yet to spot a difference. Why the major release then...?
I know it wasnt the first, but thinking back, I was pretty happy with Netscape 6/7 or whatever number it was where they introduced tabs and smaller navigation buttons (before firefox took over where they left off).
I've only ever upgraded my browsers to stop nag messages or for better (or hopefully better) security since then
These days I switch between Chrome, Firefox, and IE on a variety of different machines without fuss. Although I'm sure something very important happens in the back ground of every release, I cant think of any new feature that any web browser has introduced that I use on a daily basis since the days of Netscape.
IIRC Firefox has been transmitting anonymous telemetry info for a few versions now and it does (or did) prompt you when you install/upgrade with a bar across the top of the window.
People complaining about the invasion of privacy... what alternative browser are you using? Chrome? And what's that, you have a GMail account? And you use Google Search and Google DNS? Right.
Agree on the bloat though. Sync should be an addon. The new downloads integration is horrible, with the download retention config option not being honoured. Though still the best browser going IMO. Customisation is everything to me and I would probably die without some of the addons I use. I just wish they would stop needlessly tinkering with the UI, which has been ideal since v3/v4.
Anyone not complaining about Firefox now though... just wait until the Aurora theme becomes the default later this year. Then you'll have something to complain about! Oh and I believe the addon bar will be disappearing so it will be interesting to see what happens to those addons I use that are only accessible through the addon bar and don't expose toolbar buttons.
My Firefox is showing an average startup time of about 15 seconds. But this is because it's auto-started when I log into my Linux desktop, along with lots of other things that are triggered by me logging in, plus system services that are also starting up at the time.
Starting it manually later, it only takes about a second and a half. So any stats they get from me aren't going to tell them much that's useful.
I just wish they would fix the breakage they cause with every new version, instead of adding "new" "features" that nobody gives a shit about.
Mind you, version 18 or so does give you a download progress bar, which has only been missing for the last ten or twenty versions. Had to downgrade the fucker though after the breakage caused with cookies by their "per-window" porn mode.
The changelog in iceweasel 21.0-1 (Debian experimental) contains this:
* browser/confvars.sh: Disable Firefox Health Report.
about:support works; it's just the calling-home bit that's disabled. (Crash reporting was disabled in 2008 and remains disabled; rightly so, since Iceweasel problems should be reported via the Debian BTS.)
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