What I mean as beforehand is before it lands in nightly. If the Figma links weren’t locked down, people would’ve said it’s a shit idea before the first patch was even written.

Right, but it’s not a huge patch, especially if the only change needed is the addition of a toggle, so it feels like it’s still well within the margins of being in time. I do agree that it would be nice if the Figma files were public, though at the same time I also understand that maybe you don’t necessarily need criticism on rough ideas for which not a single line of code has written. And it’s also pretty hard for outside contributors to actually collaborate on designs, though maybe there are solutions imaginable for that :/

And yeah, glad we actually did manage to find common ground after all!

I won’t deny that Mozilla should be friendlier to community contributions.

But this is exactly it:

I enjoy testing things and shaping the future of Firefox.

So when you say:

people would’ve said beforehand

This is beforehand! You’re using Nightly so you can help shape this feature; so that that option to toggle it off gets added before this reaches regular users.

(I can also assure you that Firefox is a passion for many of the people who work on it. Some of them are pretty active on Mastodon, too.)

Right, but why don’t you just use Firefox stable? It’s not clear that that will ever have this behaviour without being able to toggle it off.

Seriously, let me say it explicitly: I admit I’m wrong.

Care to finally tell me now what’s so bad about only Nightly hiding the path from the URL bar?

I really don’t follow this… I’m just curious what you think the problem is, but no matter how often I ask it, you seem to think I’m saying that you’re wrong.

For absolute clarity, we both agree on the following, right?

• This app hides the path from the URL bar.
• This app currently still shows the full URL in the URL bar.

So I’m not saying you’re wrong about anything. I am still very curious about what the problem is, but you don’t seem to want to answer that, for the third time now?

OK, doesn’t matter who coined it, I’m just curious why you think it matters.

for the third party services that do the aggregating, which will “sell” (literal quote) the aggregate data

You’re saying you’re literally quoting the ISRG as planning to sell the data? Because that goes directly against what I’ve read about this, which I believe says that they wouldn’t even be able to because they can’t see the data.

Yours.

So yes,

your definition of “landed” is “someone wrote the code and now it’s in Nightly”, then sure, but why is that a problem?

So why is that a problem?

That only applies to personally-identifiable information.

Advertisers can already easily get this data without this setting, and any measures you take to block ads also by definition affect this setting.

Meanwhile, if this works and becomes widely available, regulators will be able to take measures against user surveillance without having to succumb to the ad industry’s argument that they won’t know whether their ads work.

And yes, this provides data to advertisers, but it’s data about their ads, not about users.

That article is about:

Data anonymization is often undertaken in two ways. First, some personal identifiers like our names and social security numbers might be deleted. Second, other categories of personal information might be modified—such as obscuring our bank account numbers.

Neither of those is what PPA does.

Of course, they’re right that history has shown that this isn’t easy. Hence:

It’s not in release yet, right? If your definition of “landed” is “someone wrote the code and now it’s in Nightly”, then sure, but why is that a problem? If you’re using Nightly, you’re choosing to use experimental features that might not look like their final behaviour (or even get released at all).

But it hasn’t landed in a Firefox release yet. Nightly is literally “someone wrote some code yesterday, and it’s in Nightly today”. Anything can still change, e.g. settings, defaults, anything. There is still lots of room for the community to give input before actual users encounter it.

t’s like with the hiding of sub directories in the URL bar of Firefox for Android, it sucks and people would’ve said beforehand

I mean, it’s still beforehand. It’s only in Nightly.

Where did you get that from? That doesn’t match at all what I have read. (At least not when it comes to this system - but maybe you’re talking about Google’s Topics API?)

Looks like this was intentional, to save some maintenance overhead, since alternatives exist: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907034

Right. And the proposed system doesn’t allow for that either, as I understand it. Instead, you show ads for baby clothes next to an article about how to burp your baby, and then learn how many people buy baby clothes via that article without knowing anything about the people reading that article.

We didn’t used to have tracking, you know? You used to just put up a billboard or put an ad in the newspaper and you just hoped it’d lead to new customers.

Even back then people tried to find ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns. For example, you’d get a discount if you passed a coupon or a coupon code, which would tell the seller that your purchase was in response to the ad.

It’s pretty painful how quickly wrong information spreads. I’m sure it’s not intentional, but that doesn’t really make it better…