I think a big part of the problem is that they didn't show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.

Firefox is still the superior browser in my opinion.

or the least bad, as I have been thinking about it lately

Nah. Turning that feature on by default already set in stone for me their willingness to test the waters. If you don't think auto-enabling anti-privacy features is a problem I don't know what to tell you. It may be "small" right now, but just wait and see what else they will try to sneak in.

Use Librewolf and Mull instead.

While it was kinda lame for Mozilla to add it with it already opted-in the way they did

That's really the rub here. Reading the technical explainer on the project, it's a pretty good idea. The problem is that they came down on the side of "more data" versus respecting their users:

Having this enabled for more people ensures that there are more people contributing to aggregates, which in turn improves utility. Having this on by default both demands stronger privacy protections — primarily smaller epsilon values and more noise — but it also enables those stronger protections, because there are more people participating. In effect, people are hiding in a larger crowd.

In short, they pulled a "trust us, bro" and turned an experimental tracking system on by default. They fully deserve to be taken to task over this.

is this something I need to do every single update?

This is just the beginnings of the enshittification of FF. There are others out there, Ladybird for example, deserves our attention being built completely from scratch engine and all. Though it's not slated to become fully usable until 2026 because, they're building the engine from scratch lol

All the naysayers in these comments read like shills

Amusing people of what you are guilty of. Sounds familiar...

Pest vs Cholera situation here...
Firefox should do an opt-in and they usually open new page with major updates with a pretty whats new changelog.
Just make it a headline topic ffs.

Regarding it's just clicking this one textbox:
Remember: Businesses also use Firefox. If you want to protect even a shred of your co-workers or clients you need to set up a fuck-load of tools to mass-disable this one little checkbox.

There's always the Ladybird browser and an independent open source browser engine called Servo that's under The Linux Foundation

I could see tor browser continuing to be developed. There are enough users who are technical enough to take on a browser project.

There are no ethical companies, only ones that are currently more profitable to operate as if they were.

100% agree, anonymized data is pretty much irrelevant to the GDPR. An exception would be if it can be de-anonymized with reasonable means.

User-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.

Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.

NOYB has the right to send a complaint if it think a company infringe upon right to privacy. Mozilla isn't entitled to special treatment or special notice before filling a complaint.

Mozilla should have expected this. They claim to defend users privacy so they should understand why consent for data collection is important. Also there was public outcry and criticism of opt-out, and yet they haven't backed down.

If Mozilla resolve these issues, NOYB could ask for the complaint to be dropped. I hope they do resolve this, and do drop the complaint.

NOYB would’ve done much better by talking to Mozilla directly and advocating for them to do the right thing going for a legal complaint as the final nuclear option. I

It has been already vastly demonstrated by Mozilla, that going to them and talking to them about how they shouldn't do shitty things doesn't work.

If it takes legal action to even try and save the browser, I'm all for it.