arrrr... what they don't realize when they review their telemetry data is that most people that use this feature have turned off sharing telemetry data. Combine that with the fact that they haven't advertised the feature in the past decade and it leads to devs thinking nobody uses it.
Then perhaps you can see why telemetry is useful to responsible companies like Firefox, and maybe people who disable it have no right to complain about decisions based off telemetry data?
No, this is supporting direct feedback. How can mozzila know which features are useful in your opinion? how should they know that you wanted [feature X]?
Maybe they are also in the wrong if the telemetry is excessive, but the alternative is to never deprecate any feature ever.
Ask who? Power users? Then the only signal they would get is "every feature is used by everyone". That's worthless 'data'. Telemetry is the only way mozilla could possibly collect real data.
They could ask slightly more focused questions than "what would you like?".
Better than keep removing features and reasons to use Firefox from some of their loyalest users, even if they are a minority. User retention seems Mozilla's largest issue at the moment now they're down under 10%.
The usage stats from telemetry showed a 0.01% usage rate. Even if 99% of people that used the Live Bookmarks feature disabled telemetry that implies that 99% of Firefox users did not use the feature.
Well, Firefox killed the RSS button on the URL bar a while ago now (bring it back with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/), so AFAIK there has been absolutely nothing to indicate the feature even existed for years now.
Also, 0.01% of a big number is still a big number, and given the state of the feature, that number is likely to include a lot of long-time users.
According to Mozilla's statistics, 0.01% amounts to only 80'000 browser installs that use live bookmarks. That's not a big number and it's easy to find features that more people care about (ie multi-tab selection).
When resources are constrained you have to make decisions about what features you'll continue to develop and which to cut out. Live bookmarks was cut out. Mozilla devs have also mentioned that this feature is ancient code and would have required a lot of coding effort to bring up to date.
I'm sure if you were to invest the time to reimplement live bookmarks with modern code and with the internal restructuring in the browser in mind and you'd volunteer to maintain it and fix all filed bugs, they'd accept it.
Given how long ago it is since live bookmarks were a feature they made obvious, or called attention to in any way, in the default install, that's not so surprising.
They removed the visibility years ago, then progressive updates made them ever less visible, including hiding then removing RSS notification. Once the first step was taken, the route to removal was set, including the telemetry figures.
If they were as visible as pocket, perhaps as visible as pocket stories on new tabs, usage would be hugely higher.
It's really weird to apparently be personally part of a 0.01% group. I feel that usage rate must be suspect- in some Firefox version they gave out live bookmarks by default, and surely more than 1 in 10,000 people still have those. Do we know what the telemetry actually measured?
when google recently made chrome automatically sign-in once you login to a google site, i read one of their technical managers basically say, "all our data shows users care more about the convenience than the privacy" -- i thought exactly that.
