>How is a lack of data for Mozilla my problem? Why does it mean that can inject default preference changes?

It would mean they can't roll out things like hardware acceleration or Stylo or Webrender as quickly despite their numerous manifest benefits.

I don’t understand. If users valued those things more than having the browser be a stand-alone piece of software after it is installed, then users would opt in to testing.

By not opting in, users would indicated that experiment-avoidance is a feature that gives them more value than the fast rollout of those other features.

Would you prefer stable only getting crucial security updates and never release updates to speed things up? Eventually Nightly would be completely different from stable, especially with the switch to Rust. So then Mozilla would have to maintain 2 completely different versions of FF - that's a lot more work!

A better middle-ground is to let things get tested by those who opt-in to it (using Nightly and Beta versions), and slowly trickle changes down. That way none of the published versions are so different that Mozilla needs more staff to handle the different versions. And of course, stable users have far fewer issues than nightly/beta users. Certificate expirations throw a wrench in the whole system, but even if you made FF stable never update, you'd still have a problem because the cert expired.

GP said

» It would mean they can't roll out things like hardware acceleration or Stylo or Webrender as quickly despite their numerous manifest benefits.

You said:

» Eventually Nightly would be completely different from stable, especially with the switch to Rust. So then Mozilla would have to maintain 2 completely different versions of FF - that's a lot more work!

As unofficially mandated by the new owners of the Internet - the Google Chrome team - the time between two "major" versions of Firefox is six (to eight) weeks. Yes, we can wait six to eight weeks for new features or twelve to eighteen weeks from trunk to stable (x2 of six to eight).

What we should do is enourage a wider swath of the population to adopt Firefox developer edition and Firefox nightly.

» A better middle-ground is to let things get tested by those who opt-in to it (using Nightly and Beta versions), and slowly trickle changes down. That way none of the published versions are so different that Mozilla needs more staff to handle the different versions.

Thank you. This is exactly what I want. I am not saying things should never change. I'm just saying don't experiment in stable. We are already hemorrhaging market share as is and this nonsense doesn't help.