[gouh]

It's okay to change certain settings if they don't touch privacy, for eg testing WebRender on some subset of users. But it shouldn't touch Privacy related settings. They should separate the settings into Privacy Sensitive and non Privacy sensitive and be only able to remotely change the latter ones

[jillesvangurp]

Technically, this is just a lightweight way to package up minor settings changes as an alternative to pushing a normal update to do the same. Both are perfectly normal and I think today's situation totally justifies using this to fix this. They do offer a way to turn this off just like you can opt out of security updates if you insist. For the vast majority of users, automated updates are a good thing.

It's kind of cool that this worked without a browser restart. My extensions just reappeared while I was watching some netflix.

[ptx]

My computer at one point used to lock up and have to be forcibly rebooted whenever something tried to use OpenGL, which was fine since I didn't use any OpenGL applications.

If Mozilla started playing around with the rendering preferences, perhaps enabling OpenGL hardware acceleration, that would definitely not have been OK. I don't need my browser deciding to suddenly surprise me by crashing my system.

[new-hires]

With a changing of the guard, the honor system can handily disappear. We saw this transpire with the burying of the JavaScript toggle. A new guy showed up, and decided that disabling JavaScript was “an advanced feature” and just too dangerous for ordinary folk. [1, 2]

Of course it begins with good intentions, and promises to leave explicit privacy options alone, but new devs show up with different opinion and the old devs are gone, and suddenly privacy options are getting toggled any old time.

Beyond even that, we all know that the realities of privacy are never ever cut and dry. Leaky details can expose people in peculiar ways. Fingerprinting preferences and hardware facts for forensic purposes has taught us that much. Viewport size, OS, connection speed, graphics capabilities, hardware acceleration profiles. Even stylometry, choice of words, manner of speech can give people away. In that sense, exposing any user choices might prove to compromise identity to some degree.

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709

2. https://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ (seriously breathless persuasive writing about how urgent it is to hide the toggle for javascript, among other things, but make no mistake, the high value target was the javascript checkbox)