As a Mozilla Web Developer who has worked on several of our websites, including this one, this is exactly the thought process behind this kind of choice.

It's the same thought process behind 90% of the things we do that people hate Mozilla for. People think Mozilla is pure and 100% ideal by whatever standards that they make up themselves, but the truth is that Mozilla is _pragmatic_. Sometimes we do things that aren't great because to do so otherwise would hurt the greater mission.

For example, we don't exist to create 100% open source software 100% of the time. Instead, we _strongly_ believe what we say in our manifesto: "Free and open source software promotes the development of the Internet as a public resource." Sometimes, mostly when we're working with a partner (like a phone company) who can offer us significant leverage, we write some code that isn't immediately made public, and _that's okay_. Our end goal isn't to put more open source software in the world, it's to further the internet as a global public resource.

(Mozilla is also so diverse and disjointed that sweeping generalizations like the ones I just made are completely inaccurate. We make mistakes and we make bad choices. Mozilla is more like several different companies that happen to share the same name.)

1. independent as in funded almost entirely by google and ads (ads implying a form of surveillance hence privacy issues).

2. Well that's a bold statement to make to say that web analytics have to be third party to provide valuable actionable insights.

3. I don't care about operational efficiency, I care about my privacy. If mozilla sacrifices privacy for operational efficiency, well they do sacrifice privacy.

4. WTF are you talking about,visiting a mozilla webpage that doesn't give away analytics data to a third party gives better privacy than visiting a mozilla webpage that does. This is true whatever the rest of the world does. Besides mozilla has no reach on that billion of websites.

I tend to differ, the track record does not exactly point toward shipping great software, nor protecting the interest of individuals. As shown by bugs marked as won't solve and inclusion of controversial features while removing other.

So yup, you are missing the point because you seem blinded by your own vision.

I mean this is an honest way, but what actionable insights?

Mozilla aren't selling anything on that page. They won't be making key engineering decisions off of the page.

Could you detail the gains that they could make that makes the world a better place? That justify any sort of tracking over '300, 000 people viewed this page today' that you can get from your own logs?

There is some data that might be occasionally useful, like screen sizes, but only occasionally.

> Mozilla is one of the good, independent orgs

So they say, but their actions, here, put them in with Google.

> If they remove third-party analytics from their web properties, Mozilla instantly loses valuable actionable insights that significantly increase their efficiency as an organization.

I disagree, and I fail to see what Mozilla needs from analytics badly enough to require them to partner with Google in such a privacy-robbing fashion.

> If Mozilla loses operational efficiency, Google/Microsoft becomes more powerful and are able to obtain more users for Chrome/IE. They use all analytics they need.

So Mozilla should feed Google more data?

> No meaningful privacy increase for users is achieved, Google Analytics is now installed on (billions - 1) websites.

You just said Google and Mozilla were in competition. Make up your mind.