This has been brought up before (not here, just in general). The short answer is they heavily customized the analytics so it’s not as ‘bad’ out of the box. You can read more about it below.
You can probably ask them directly if you’d want more of an answer. They don’t seem to be trying to hide anything.
Edit: also, as far as I know, Firefox actively should be blocking Google Analytics, unless they changed it (which is possible). About four years ago, Firefox started blocking Google Analytics by default.
Well said. May be worth reading through this GitHub issue and this Bugzilla issue as well. Its worth noting its also directly integrated into the browser as well in about:addons.
I’m personally not a fan of Firefox/Mozilla integrating and using Google Analytics, even under these circumstances, and think it does deserve criticism, but it is what it is I guess. I do hope they switch to a better alternative in the future.
In the meantime, setting the following about:config options should take care of and fully strip out Google Analytics and extension recommendations from about:addons:
“extensions.getAddons.showPane” to false
“extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled” to false
The big problem with blocking GA altogether is that GA is usually how people who put together websites find out what browsers people are using to browse those websites.
And if you’re about to say “But they can just look at the user agent in access.log!”, sure they can, but those are in logs that are accessed by sysadmins, not people trying to find out how their websites are used. The first thing someone who’s trying to find out how to optimize their website does is go into GA. If they see no Firefox users in GA, then they don’t care about Firefox compatibility. They may even filter it out to prevent bots.
In order to fix the tracking cookies thing we need to do more than block a popular tool for getting website metrics, we need to understand why it’s used and provide alternatives that respect privacy.
This has been brought up before (not here, just in general). The short answer is they heavily customized the analytics so it’s not as ‘bad’ out of the box. You can read more about it below.
You can probably ask them directly if you’d want more of an answer. They don’t seem to be trying to hide anything.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1122305#c8
Edit: also, as far as I know, Firefox actively should be blocking Google Analytics, unless they changed it (which is possible). About four years ago, Firefox started blocking Google Analytics by default.
Well said. May be worth reading through this GitHub issue and this Bugzilla issue as well. Its worth noting its also directly integrated into the browser as well in about:addons.
I’m personally not a fan of Firefox/Mozilla integrating and using Google Analytics, even under these circumstances, and think it does deserve criticism, but it is what it is I guess. I do hope they switch to a better alternative in the future.
In the meantime, setting the following about:config options should take care of and fully strip out Google Analytics and extension recommendations from about:addons:
“extensions.getAddons.showPane” to false
“extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled” to false
“browser.discovery.enabled” to false
“browser.discovery.sites” to be empty
Thank you.
The big problem with blocking GA altogether is that GA is usually how people who put together websites find out what browsers people are using to browse those websites.
And if you’re about to say “But they can just look at the user agent in access.log!”, sure they can, but those are in logs that are accessed by sysadmins, not people trying to find out how their websites are used. The first thing someone who’s trying to find out how to optimize their website does is go into GA. If they see no Firefox users in GA, then they don’t care about Firefox compatibility. They may even filter it out to prevent bots.
In order to fix the tracking cookies thing we need to do more than block a popular tool for getting website metrics, we need to understand why it’s used and provide alternatives that respect privacy.