Why not think about the program you are working on as a program that is built to support the open standards that enable people to communicate and concentrate on performance within these standards? If someone wrote a bad performing non standard compliant code the program should throw an error.

Making bad code run faster is overstepping the boundaries.

But we're not making "bad code" run faster. We're making code run faster. The original counterpoint was that we shouldn't be, because improving the performance just gives leeway for bad programmers to use it as a crutch.

We don't prioritize bad code for optimization. See usage of 'with' in Javascript. We don't actively try to make it worse, but whenever a decision is presented which regresses 'with' performance for gains somewhere else, it'll probably be taken because we don't care about 'with' running fast.

But the example I mentioned: histograms of max GC pause times on a particular website. Or particularly bad janks, or long amounts of time spent in JS which might be the result of poor JS execution..

None of these optimize "bad code". They're just standard platform performance optimizations that help all programs. That will include "bad" programs as well.

THAT is your use case? And this just CAN NOT be done from opt-in? Makes no sense.

If mozilla can't see how utterly insane this is then there is no hope left.

I've used Netscape then switched to Firefox when Netscape became way too bloated, then enjoyed years and years of Firefox getting better, supporting new JS and HTML5 features all WITHOUT telemetry and with the Crash Reporting window where I can see the data that is being submitted and submit it if I want to submit it.

What have changed so much in last 5 years or so that now you have to get all this data? What is wrong with just building a standarts compliant browser that runs JS fast and has easy to understand settings (where I don't have to go to about:config to disable the WebRTC/telemetry/Pocket etc) ?

> What have changed so much in last 5 years or so that now you have to get all this data?

To be honest, a lot. Once again, this is my personal take on the matter, not Mozilla's view.

First off, browsers were a LOT simpler back then. The sophistication and complexity in a browser has grown significantly in the last decade or so.

Secondly, browsers have matured. Remember that this software category has only been around for 20 years or so. Compared to the code quality in browsers today, browsers of 10 years ago were crude and simple. As a software category matures, the low-hanging fruit dry up, so it's harder and harder to improve your product.

Lastly, competition. Firefox has the luxury of being released when the biggest competitor (Microsoft) wasn't putting real effort into its browser product. Google will not make that same mistake with Chrome.

Basically, the information we needed back then was less, because the problems were much more obvious, because the whole industry was still pretty young. Now browsers are much more mature, the ecosystem is much more complex, has a much wider user base, and the problems are becoming harder and harder to pin down.

I think it's good to annotate this with your other comment as to why Firefox has to join this competition, rather than just do it's think and disregard its marketshare:

> A perfectly private browser with no marketshare doesn't help users. A completely compromised browser with 100% marketshare doesn't help users either.