Ridiculous firefox survey!

[BigBadBeef]

Why are you satisfied with Firefox? Why do you think we're doing a good job? We're confused, many people use our product, but we don't know why even though we are the ones who made it!

Questions like this... disturb me. Are the developers of firefox really that dense that they cannot judge the appeal of their product based on the changes of their "market" share?

 

[The Duck]

A few years back there were some Firefox survey scams and I bet this is another one.

 

[BigBadBeef]

No its an official survey. They don't ask for any personal data or login information or anything of a kind.

 

[MikeRocor]

View attachment 17047

Why are you satisfied with Firefox? Why do you think we're doing a good job? We're confused, many people use our product, but we don't know why even though we are the ones who made it!

Questions like this... disturb me. Are the developers of firefox really that dense that they cannot judge the appeal of their product based on the changes of their "market" share?

"Are the developers of firefox really that dense..."

Why, yes, apparently they are! But then...

Market share only tells them that so many users like their product better than the alternatives. That's not saying much.

These developers apparently live in a little world populated by some mix of idealists, academics and "UX experts" and are completely isolated from actual users. or maybe I'm just, gasp, an "atypical user" (a distinct possibility). The devs think its OK to

• turn off the menu bar by default
• nag about updates, even for those who, by choice, cannot install them. (no opt-out)
• by default, phone home with "technical and interaction data"
• by default, "Allow firefox to install and run studies"
• search from the url bar every time you make a typo in a url (no opt-out)

They have no problem with users having to spend a half hour going through the "settings" page with a fine toothed comb on every installation just to make sure there are no surprises.

It's no wonder there are a few forks of firefox although, alas, they pretty much all get it wrong, too. (And no, thanks for the suggestion, I don't see me developing my own browser.)

So yeah, if they're actually soliciting input from their users, then we can only hope they'll take the responses to heart. And, I guess, each of us has to hope that we're not in the minority, opinion-wise.

 

[dos2unix]

• by default, phone home with "technical and interaction data"
• by default, "Allow firefox to install and run studies"

Do you think Chrome doesn't do this?

 

[BigBadBeef]

"Are the developers of firefox really that dense..."

Why, yes, apparently they are! But then...

Market share only tells them that so many users like their product better than the alternatives. That's not saying much.

These developers apparently live in a little world populated by some mix of idealists, academics and "UX experts" and are completely isolated from actual users. or maybe I'm just, gasp, an "atypical user" (a distinct possibility). The devs think its OK to

• turn off the menu bar by default
• nag about updates, even for those who, by choice, cannot install them. (no opt-out)
• by default, phone home with "technical and interaction data"
• by default, "Allow firefox to install and run studies"
• search from the url bar every time you make a typo in a url (no opt-out)

They have no problem with users having to spend a half hour going through the "settings" page with a fine toothed comb on every installation just to make sure there are no surprises.

It's no wonder there are a few forks of firefox although, alas, they pretty much all get it wrong, too. (And no, thanks for the suggestion, I don't see me developing my own browser.)

So yeah, if they're actually soliciting input from their users, then we can only hope they'll take the responses to heart. And, I guess, each of us has to hope that we're not in the minority, opinion-wise.

Well that escalated quickly...

 

[MikeRocor]

Do you think Chrome doesn't do this?

Not at all, but I don't use Chrome enough to even bother ranting about it.

 

[MikeRocor]

Well that escalated quickly...

Touched a nerve there. I just happened to be in the middle of trying to determine if firefox 118.0.1/32 was responsible for trashing some read-only files that are important to running my X environment. Turns out it's probably not - looks like just a bad USB stick.

 

[wendy-lebaron]

That message at the bottom of the "dialog" in the screenshot of the OP... now if only I could lie about my age.

Haha yes, and the programs on Windows that, after running the uninstaller try to summon the web browser to ask the user what for. I guess such a developer started taking, "It sucks!" as a compliment, or extremely bored. IIRC I got this from an Australian company, NCH Software. I bought a few things for them, especially Switch, the program that could convert from one audio file format to another. Boy they forced me to download additional codecs for MP3, OGG, FLAC and what have you. I was unpleasantly surprised after I really had enough of that program. :/

 

[osprey]

wendy-lebaron wrote:

I bought ... Switch, the program that could convert from one audio file format to another

The sox program is an effective free software audio file converter. YMMV.

 

[Condobloke]

SoX is a command line utility that can convert various formats of computer audio files in to other formats. It can also apply various effects to these sound files during the conversion. As an added bonus, SoX can play and record audio files on several unix-style platforms.

SoX is able to handle formats like Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV, AIFF, VOC, SND, AU, GSM and several more. Any format support requires at least libsox-fmt-base. Some formats have their own package e.g. mp3 read and write support is provided by libsox-fmt-mp3.

SoX supports most common sound architectures i.e. Alsa, Libao, OSS and Pulse (respectively provided by libsox-fmt-alsa, libsox-fmt-ao, libsox-fmt-oss and libsox-fmt-pulse). It also supports LADSPA plugins.

 

[bob466]

I don't do surveys...so no one gets my info.