On 3/18/14 6:56 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
Do you know where we can review the conversation around the original
decision, when telemetry first came along, to enable it by default on
nightly and aurora, but not on beta and release?
There is some history in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699806
I seem to remember the argument being made that nightly and aurora users
should expect to be part of the development community, but that beta and
release users would not necessarily have that expectation. I think
there's merit in that view.
The prior discussions did involve a distinction between nightly/aurora
and beta/release, but it's not clear why we chose that distinction. The
visible distinction between beta and aurora is that we use the Firefox
official branding on the beta channel. We do this so that we can have
good prerelease testing. But otherwise the primary difference between
the channels is not a different expectation of data, but a different
expectation of risk/reward. Nightly lives on the cutting edge and is
generally less stable, and as you move up into aurora/beta you get
additional stability at the cost of not having all the new shiny hotness.
In terms of the default data choices, however, I believe beta should
just be considered one of our pre-release channels. One of the primary
purposes of a prerelease channel is to be able to validate our design
decisions and collect feedback before changes hit the world. I believe
that beta users in general expect to help with these things and this
change in defaults reflects that.
Another important factor in this decision is that the current
nightly/aurora population is significantly skewed toward advanced users
who are capable of living on the cutting edge; those channels have much
less coverage of users with older/less-capable hardware, newer
consumer-grade hardware, non-English locales, users with popular
extensions, and so forth.
Most experiments require a representative population, and quite a few
will be specifically targeted at locales which don't exist in
nightly/aurora. As an example, the Firefox in-browser translation
experiment, which will be targeted to users in three countries.
In addition I forgot to mention that as part of this plan we will modify
the Firefox beta download page to mention that telemetry is on by
default, as the current nightly/aurora pages do.
I'm sure the data would be very useful to us, but (obviously) that's not
the end of the discussion.
Are you saying that you disagree with this plan, or ?
--BDS
_______________________________________________
dev-privacy mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-privacy
