[dahart]

There almost certainly is not a way to invisibly install add-ons, unless you are part of Mozilla, and, you know, making Firefox. If paranoia is your thing, it might be worth considering that Mozilla can do anything it wants inside Firefox core, all of it is "invisible" to you.

[kuschku]

And this is the point where even the most Mozilla-supporting users move away. For me, this is it, I’m going to Chromium.

Fuck this shit, in the past months we had CliqZ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15421708, we had Mozilla adding new telemetry, we had Mozilla force-enable toolkit.telemetry.enabled, we had Mozilla say that, if you download Nightly, that is considered opt-in to tracking, we had Mozilla put Google Analytics into the Addons menu (because it’s loaded from addons.mozilla.org: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785 ), and we had Mozilla say that, if we don’t trust Google, we shouldn’t use Firefox.

Fuck this.

[programd]

Regarding telemetry, take a look at the settings in about:config. There are several toolkit.telemetry.Ping settings which are set to true by default. In the spirit of charity I'm going to assume that those phone home pings - on startup, shutdown, update - are not enabled unless telemetry is enabled. But I have not checked...

[bigbugbag]

Alternatively you can give waterfox[1] a try.

Features

    Disabled Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)
    Disabled Web Runtime (deprecated as of 2015)
    Removed Pocket
    Removed Telemetry
    Removed data collection
    Removed startup profiling
    Allow running of all 64-Bit NPAPI plugins
    Allow running of unsigned extensions
    Removal of Sponsored Tiles on New Tab Page
    Addition of Duplicate Tab option
    Locale selector in about:preferences > General

[1]: https://www.waterfoxproject.org/

[Danihan]

Great points, thanks for compiling these..

I was using firefox because I don't trust google. ;(

[bo1024]

Yes and a big part of this entire issue is users deciding whether we can trust Mozilla with that power or not.

[Sylos]

And he's saying that this occurence should have no effect on this decision, not in any rational mind.