Firefox 7 comes with a very interesting optional feature. It's not something that most users will care about, but if you're a Firefox fan and want to help the team make it even better, there's now a simple way of doing this that doesn't really ask too much of you.Firefox 7 adds a new capability Mozilla dubs 'telemetry.' Essentially, it's a way of transmitting real world performace data back to Mozilla so it knows how Firefox handles on actual users' machines and how it copes with various scenarios that can't be tested in the lab.
"It is difficult to model a 'typical' computer in a lab environment. Surprisingly slow consumer hardware, changes in usage patterns, preinstalled bloatware all affect Firefox performance in surprising ways," Mozilla
says.
Yet so far, that's been the only way for Mozilla to predict how Firefox performs. Meanwhile, Google has been able to track Chrome real-world performance via an opt-in feature.
"Firefox 7 telemetry will prompt users to opt-in to reporting performance data to Mozilla. This data will supplement our existing benchmarking infrastructure to help us optimize future Firefox releases," Mozilla said.
If enabled, the feature will send back the following data to Mozilla: Memory usage, CPU core count, Cycle collection times and Startup speed.
Firefox 7 will prompt users asking them if they want to contribute. Users can also enable the feature manually by going to the Preferences dialog, the Advanced tab and then the General tab where they'll notice the "Submit performance data" checkbox.
Mozilla has put a lot of emphasis on the privacy of the feature. Any data that's sent is only related to the current session. There is no per-user ID, for Mozilla, data sent by the same browser in two different days is the same as data sent by two browsers from different continents.
Telemetry is disabled during private browsing and Mozilla worked to have no personally-identifiable data sent. Whatever is sent is via an encrypted connection.
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