Yo, other people aren't inside your head, and don't know what you're thinking. It's obvious to you what you're thinking, but until you say it out loud and communicate with us, I can't know if the "shady tracking" setting you're thinking about is the one about Dns over Https or the ones you mentioned or the fact that it's not all routed via Tor/a VPN. we're willing to believe you, and I'm able to look for myself, but you gotta give us something (which you did, thanks). What's hard to understand is where you are coming from. It's easy for me to believe that Firefox is acting "shady", but saying only that much, and no more, is banal and uninteresting. People are willing to do their homework, but you have to tell them what textbook you're working out of and which chapter you're in. I can't see, over the Internet, your reading history so it's impossible, not just difficult, without any frame of reference, to know what you believe is shady or even where you've looked.
Anyway. why does the installation of the Pocket seem so shady to you? There are a number of other features in the program you just installed that you probably weren't aware of. I mean, I didn't read the full source of Firefox before installing it, so there are many features now on my computer that I didn't know I was getting into when I installed Firefox. Is it the fact that Pocket (which Mozilla bought) has a premium tier that causes you to classify it as "shady"?
By my measure, any telemetry sent back that wasn't explicitly opted into is shady. Once data has left my machine, it's out of my control and anything can happen to it.
We may not have time to fully audit the source, but individuals and groups I trust have, and have made forks that cut out this telemetry as well as other potentially unsavory features. One can also monitor network traffic in and out of an a browser app to understand what is being sent.
I'm using Bromite on my phone right now to type this.
Anyway. why does the installation of the Pocket seem so shady to you? There are a number of other features in the program you just installed that you probably weren't aware of. I mean, I didn't read the full source of Firefox before installing it, so there are many features now on my computer that I didn't know I was getting into when I installed Firefox. Is it the fact that Pocket (which Mozilla bought) has a premium tier that causes you to classify it as "shady"?