This post is misinformation. No data is sent by default, you have to opt in.
people who hate firefox are eating it up. it’s so stupid
These people are all mostly either from closed source Chrome clone camp or are Brave BATshit lovers. Some of them may be from GrapheneOS toxic racist community as well, who always cry about Tor adopting Firefox as base.
After a lot of regular Firefox users got converted into above due to BLM political whining (because white lives matter) and some actually sane criticisms regarding default Proton UI (which are changeable via userchrome.css), an atomic sized portion of people is left sticking with Firefox, like me. I have been a user since Firebird days.
I have a lot of legitimate criticisms regarding their aligning with the NSA spy company Apple, and the (default) Cloudflare DNS option for DoH (that led to the idiot nextbern giving me a 6 month ban on r/firefox because he got pissed by downvotes he got), as well as their greedy CEO and her bunch of PR and HR minions. What Firefox has though is Tor upstreamed security benefits, and a customisable user.js and userchrome.css, and extensions that are not crippled by Manifest V3 changes, or any of the FLoC or IdleDetection API spyware.
No, you are the one providing misinformation. The explanation you linked to is completely wrong. “offline” actually means that you are silently and automatically “opted-in”, so basically what everybody except Mozilla calls opt-out.
However, this does not change anything to the fact that these “suggestions” were silently enabled in Firefox 92, and that the opt-in dialog box was introduced only in Firefox 93. In addition, this opt-in dialog is not shown if you left your locale as the default “en-US” (“offline” = opt-out).
Quoting from source code comment:
Sets the appropriate Firefox Suggest scenario based on the current Nimbus
- rollout (if any) and “hardcoded” rollouts (if any). The possible scenarios
- are:
- history
- This is the scenario when the user is not in any rollouts. Firefox
- Suggest suggestions are disabled.
- offline
- This is the scenario for the “offline” rollout. Firefox Suggest
- suggestions are enabled by default. Search strings and matching keywords
- are not included in related telemetry. The onboarding dialog is not
- shown.
- online
- This is the scenario for the “online” rollout. The onboarding dialog will
- be shown and the user must opt in to enable Firefox Suggest suggestions
- and related telemetry, which will include search strings and matching
- keywords.
Related source code:
async _updateFirefoxSuggestScenarioHelper() { let scenario = this._nimbus.quickSuggestScenario; if (!scenario) { await Region.init(); if ( Region.home == “US” && Services.locale.appLocaleAsBCP47.substring(0, 2) == “en” ) { // offline rollout for en locales in the US region scenario = “offline”; } else { // no rollout scenario = “history”; } }
I think this should be self explanatory.
