Is this post more about trying to discredit/bash Mozilla/Firefox, than it is about explaining what's happening and why? It seems that way.

I'm not worried at all, about this. Firefox is still Open Source. You can be OS, and still collect some data.

You can collect data AND be open source.

Also, I would suggest that Mozilla is turning away from open development rather than turning away from open source.

Orion by Kagi is a great replacement imo.

What are firefox labs...?

If it's experimental features there is actually an argument that telemetry might be the a big point of them offering those features in the first place.

I think locking it sucks, they could still get valuable feedback from community discussion without telemetry, but I'm guessing those features being there for testing and experimentation and therefor needing telemetry to evaluate them is the reasoning for the choice... :/

LibreWolf has been nearly ideal for me

This is part of a significant Overton window shift.

In 2017, Mozilla fans criticized the addition of data collection by default.

Then we slowly slid towards acceptance of data collection by default, with people saying "stop complaining, you can turn it off manually."

Now it's 2025, and you can't use some features of Firefox unless you opt in to data collection.

That kind of makes sense? Aren't the labs when they're A/B testing or benchmarking new features before general release and toggle random people's settings doing so? I vaguely recall some drama around that.

If I turn off telemetry I want those off too, it makes sense they're linked. It you want a new feature there's always nightly+about:config, but I don't want it downloading random config toggles especially if it's not reporting back that it broke my stuff. The code should be what I installed and compiled by my distro, not some random lab blob downloaded off their servers at runtime.

Didn't they make some nefarious post on their shit intentions earlier this year? Rip mozilla.