The Phorm bug is spreading. The idea of collecting a user's browsing history and flogging that data doesn't just appeal to ISPs. The Mozilla Foundation, the people behind the Firefox browser, want some of that action too.

The Foundation is officially a tax exempt non-profit - but still manages to pay its chairperson $500,000 a year. Executives last week confirmed they are working on a project referred to internally as "Data". This would gather anonymised data on a voluntary basis, and provide the analytical information for anyone who wanted it.

More at The Register.

Now I'll have to start looking through the source code before I upgrade, or find another browser.

I like this

You would think going by privacy as a whole, that unless they want to die they would stay away from this kind of thing. Look at Windows Vista. The only reason why it failed so badly was mostly because of the privacy issue, or the lack of it when the system wants to phone home, DRM, etc, etc, etc. As well as the fact it bugs the hell out of you with all it's notifications as a half-assed attempt at security.

What's wrong with Opera?
I'm using a statically built (against QT4) 9.50 snapshot, and while it's not 100% stable+ready yet, I can assure you it's much faster, and using less resources than a highly customized (for speed) Firefox3 RC1.
And of course, there's no comparison with the Firefox 2.X series- it's ages faster/more responsive, while using about one third of the RAM...

For gnome users, the extra overhead required to use a QT app

Did you guys bother reading before jumping on Mozilla?

At most, it will be a checkbox during install to participate or not (probably off by default) and it's anonymised so it can't be linked back to you.

So...who cares? Mountain out of a mole hill...

More and more I find that the register just spreads FUD. I love the part about bugs in the "bloated browser" - because they totally couldn't use the same bugs to get the same information with this proposed future "feature"

you're on the internet. your web surfing habits aren't private. they never have been. get used to that fact. stop looking at pr0n.