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> It isn't.

So you're saying that Firefox did not on fact have an outage due to a change in their telemetry servers? That's not what the article said.

I understand that you mean to say that it isn't intended for networking to be taken down by telemetry. That's nonetheless what happened, and it could have been prevented by treating telemetry as a different class of traffic (not collocating it with normal requests), or by not having it, as others point out.



So you're saying telemetry should be handled as a separate process that has nothing to do with the rest of the browser, and treated like a hostile service? Because that's the only way you'd have avoided this.

It's natural for all the network stuff that goes in inside a browser to share code. You can say what you want about telemetry (I'm not a huge fan, personally), but this was a dumb bug and it is completely unreasonable to expect some kind of adversarial design "just in case a freak bug triggers on telemetry network requests".


> So you're saying telemetry should be handled as a separate process that has nothing to do with the rest of the browser, and treated like a hostile service? [... T]his was a dumb bug and it is completely unreasonable to expect some kind of adversarial design "just in case a freak bug triggers on telemetry network requests".

I absolutely agree that this a dumb bug having little to nothing to do with telemetry. It is not even the first case-sensitivity HTTP/3 bug I’m personally encountering in the course of completely casual use[1]. Probably not the last, either, those joints ain’t gonna oil themselves.

At the same time, you know what? I’m glad you suggested this, because I certainly didn’t think of it. Yes, in an ideal world, telemetry absolutely should be a separate process (or thread, or at least not share an event loop—a separate “hang domain”, a vat[2] if you want). And so should everything else off the critical path.

I’m not saying Firefox is bad for doing it differently. I’m saying it’s silly that Firefox is forced to play OS to such an extent because the actual one isn’t up to its demands.

[1] https://github.com/ndilieto/uacme/pull/11

[2] http://www.erights.org/elib/concurrency/vat.html


(off topic)

I read that at first glance as

> Probably not the last, either, those joints ain’t gonna roll themselves.

and thought, hm, I need to remember this debugging technique next time I'm stumped.


They're saying what is clearly explained in the article:

“This is why users who disabled Telemetry would see this problem resolved even though the problem is not related to Telemetry functionality itself and could have been triggered otherwise.”


Yes, but the fact that telemetry is in place was the cause for the issue.

> So you're saying that Firefox did not on fact have an outage due to a change in their telemetry servers?

Not the telemetry code. Not the fact that it "could" happen elsewhere. But rather the fact that it was in place and in this instance happened because of it.

Not that it matters that much. Regardless of the particular cause, a browser failing to work because of something changing externally is crazy (at least to me), no matter how you look at it.

Edit: this is now largely a duplicate of the other comment, hmm: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30179023




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