TL;DR: Mozilla is now enforcing data collection as a pre-requisite to access new features in Firefox Labs. This is backed by the Terms of Use that Mozilla introduced a few months ago.
Firefox Nightly has always had more telemetry enabled by default. The idea isn’t that you get exclusive first access to new features; the idea is that you’re helping test future feature to make sure they’re ready for a proper release. That includes helping Mozilla learn what works well.
If you don’t want that, you can always wait for the feature to be released as normal, after it has benefited from testing by users who were open to informing its development.
In other words, this:
Mozilla never feature-gated new features behind data collection – simply downloading Firefox Nightly or Beta was enough to try out the newest features in testing.
is incorrect, as downloading Nightly or Beta is opting in to more data collection. See here, where it says:
Nightly is an unstable testing and development platform. By default, Nightly sends data to Mozilla — and sometimes our partners — to help us handle problems and try ideas.
And note that this was already the case before the new ToU, so it’s probably unrelated to that.
/cc @yoasif@fedia.io @yoasif@mastodon.social
Edit: although of course the nuance here is that you can optout in Nightly and still use everything.
Yes, it sends data by default - but you can disable that. Not so for Firefox Labs.
