I find it kind of funny that your shared link url contain tracking parameters.

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

All the naysayers in these comments read like shills

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

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.

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

If it's added as already opted in, I assume they pop something up to make it clear what's been added and enabled, and how it affects the user's privacy, with a link to the settings to change it if desired?

If so, that's not too bad, no.

If they added it and didn't make it clear, or worse yet didn't call attention to it at all, that would piss me off.

is this something I need to do every single update?

Kudos for putting together good reasons that you don't like PPA, while also acknowledging that Mozilla is trying to solve a problem.

Yours is one of the very few reasonable objections I've read IMO - when the PPA outrage first erupted, I read through how it worked. Unique ID + website unaware of interaction, but browser recognizing, then feeding it to an intermediate aggregator that anonymizes data by aggregating from multiple users without sharing their IDs, with the aim of trying to find a middle ground seems fair to me. Especially with the opt-out being so easy.

However, your points about classes clickbait encouragement, SEO feeding, and the uncertainty that this will solve the web spamminess as it is are valid concerns.

That battle is lost. Wait for ladybird or servo if you have any hope.

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

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