So is it safe to assume that alternate builds of Firefox (Pale Moon et al) will be probably removing that “feature” ?
So all browsers except some forks of Firefox are cooked now/soon?
Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry
No thanks, I’ll pass
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Programming languages isn’t adware made by a company that has horrible track records for respecting privacy. If you love Facebook so much, stay there and take your sealioning with you.
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I’d rather not use products made by companies that influence voters and led to a genocide. Sorry I have moral standard.
“Hating on anything the Nazis did is stupid because they can build ok cars”
Doing one ok thing doesn’t negate the fact that Meta is one of the most evil, unethical hellholes of a company. Anything they touch is absolutely rotten.
Is there a list anywhere of this and other settings and features that could/should certainly be changed to better Firefox privacy?
Other than that I’m not sure I’m really going to jump ship. I think I’m getting too old for the “clunkiness” that comes with trying to use third party/self hosted alternatives to replace features that ultimately break the privacy angle, or to add them to barebones privacy focused browsers. Containers and profile/bookmark syncing, for example. But if there’s a list of switches I can flip to turn off the most egregious things, that would be good for today.
A custom user.js might be a good base to work off of. For example https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox
But jumping ship might be your best bet. Forks like Librewolf are good or otherwise a privacy respecting Chromium browser can work well too.
otherwise a privacy respecting Chromium browser
With manifest v3 and this thing active on chromium browsers, privacy respecting chromium may not exist.
Some browsers have built in adblock (by reimplementing mv2 apis or otherwise) and cut out the hangouts plugin or let you disable it
Not all, but a couple
For now, that’s possible. But for how long? When mv2 came out, we had a few hold off as long as they could, but now they’re all v2 or v3. New technology will always kill the old, whether or not it’s better. It’s only a matter of time. Going with a browser that has consistently made anticonsumer decisions because a different browser has made a few, doesn’t seem like the sensible choice here. Granted, we should have a browser that hadn’t made any such decisions, but we don’t yet have one that I’m aware (I hope I’m wrong).
Totally agree, unfortunately it’s a question of whether Chromium forks can’t keep up with cutting out Google stuff comes before or after Mozilla and/or their rendering engine falls apart.
Fingers crossed for Ladybird + Servo
I’m still holding out for Mozilla. They’ve gone all “corporate” lately, but they weren’t always that way. Ladybird does look like a good project.
Just use LibreWolf; I’m not up to speed on this stuff but I more or less believe the hype that it will protect my privacy simply by taking Firefox and adding an ad blocker for me and disabling all the shit for me
To disable:
user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);Alternatively you can do the same through Settings -> Privacy & Security -> Website Advertising Preferences and uncheck “Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement”
Yup, but that’s already mentioned in the article. Thought I’d give people the exact userpref, so they can modify their custom
user.jsif they have one.
I’ve tried explaining to the Firefox cult that they do a lot of tracking and telemetry by default but they just hurl insults. Time to leave the cult.
tracking and telemetryby Firefox is not even comparable to that of chrome. Google knows you better than you. Firefox’s telemetry used to be solely for improving user experience, and not ads and bullshit.Now that Firefox’s gonna show us some ads, I think I have to get away from it as a protest
I get a lot of beef for Brave. Any viable alternatives that aren’t derivatives of Chromium or FF but are maintained?
Firefox forks seem to be the best option. Chromium-based browsers still report to Google unless you basically break them.
Default Firefox is becoming more and more unusable. I hope distros will start switching to something like Librewolf as the default browser in the future or heavily (and visibly) change the default Firefox config themselves.
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99% of their users are not these things
I don’t think so. People using Firefox are freaking evangelists trying to spread privacy. And if Firefox should lose those people, it will truly be the end
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And these days, privacy is basically the only appeal of Firefox. It’s slower than chrome or webkit based browsers, hangs out with Safari in terms of standards support, and can’t hold a candle to either other browser when it comes to battery life. Why mozilla seems determined to throw that all away is beyond me
WTH, Mozilla 🤦🏼♀️
Also, fuck you, dude:
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging, so they had to opt users in by default.
“You’re too dumb to understand so we make decisions for you”
Fuck that condescending prick with a pineapple.
If you can’t explain a difficult concept in a simple way, then you don’t truly understand it.
i read that as more like “nobody would opt in if it was opt-in”.
One Mozilla developer claimed that explaining PPA would be too challenging
It’s not that difficult to explain. “When you visit the website of a participating advertiser whose ads you’ve seen, do you want us to tell them that someone saw their ads and visited their site, without telling them it was you? Y/N”
But if they asked such a question almost all of the small fraction of users who bother to read the whole sentence would still see no good reason to want to participate. Coming up with one is that hard part. It requires some pretty fancy rationalizations. Firefox keeping track of which ads I’ve seen? No, thanks.
If there was an option to make sure that advertisers whose ads I’ve blocked know that they got blocked, I might go for that.
The writer apparently thinks that the previous Mozilla misstep into advertising land was the Mr. Robot thing six years ago, which seems to confirm my impression that this one is getting a bigger reaction than their other recent moves in this direction. We’ll see if the rest of the tech press picks it up. Maybe one day when the cumulative loss of users shows up more clearly in the telemetry they’ll reconsider.
Let’s not forget when they shipped a full page ad for a Disney movie into a browser update
I think explaining a system like PPA would be a difficult task.
IMO that just means they barely understand it themselves. Anyone that understands something with an amount of proficiency can explain it to a
childlayman and it’ll make sense, given they don’t use technical nomenclature.*Layman is a better term. Children are… complicated.
The difficulty is in spinning it to sound non invasive. And of course takes a level of self corruption to even want to do that, since PPA is invasive and you have to delude yourself into thinking otherwise.
Oh wow, that needs to be off by default like yesterday. 💀
So I read a bit of Mozilla’s documentation about this feature. It sounds like they’re trying to replace the current practices with something safer. Honestly, my first thought is that this is a good thing for two reasons.
- It’s an attempt to replace cross site tracking methods, which are terrible
- Those of us that fight against ads, tracking, etc. can simple use typical methods to block the api. Methods that were already using (I think)
If both of these are true, then it could be a net positive for the world. Please tell me if I’m wrong!
Sometimes I just get tired of having to fight against software to have it behave in a semi-decent way. The same way you technically “can” run a decent windows installation after removing/disabling/blocking a ton of stuff, I don’t really want a browser that can be trusted after you had to tinker with dozens of settings to just get back to basic non-intrusive behavior.
I said this in another thread on the same topic somewhere else, but considering user tracking as an inevitability that we have to accept means we’ve already lost on that front.
Wow. I 100% agree with you here.
There’s an element of trust when you buy a product. You trust that the product itself isn’t malicious and is intended to help you in some way. E.g. “This food is safely prepared and won’t poison me.” Harvesting user data and advertising really violate that trust.
Though it is worth noting that we don’t buy web browsers. We simply use them for “free“.
I agree.
Imagine a world where Chrome doesn’t exist and instead Firefox + privacy preserving attribution is the default for all of the people who won’t listen to your reasons why they shouldn’t use chrome or say “I don’t need privacy, I have nothing to hide”.
It seems like Mozilla is trying to do the browser equivalent of shifting the overton window and I’m for that.
However I’ll be monitoring them very very closely.
Ya this is definitely one to maintain some skepticism about. People are criticizing the API’s security in other posts.
Does Firefox explain what measures they’ve taken to protect their aggregation servers? If so, this is a perfectly fine and practical method for privacy preservation
Looks like they are using a Prio based protocol. If they are using Prio2+, I think this article is likely overblown. EDIT: I mixed up my sources - Mozilla tested Prio for telemetry collection. They are using a system called IPA for ads, and I don’t know whether there are formal guarantees for this system
Should I now ditch Firefox for Librewolf?
Edit: I just did that
Sad to see Mozilla being managed into the ground, betraying their principles and selling their users.
Mozilla pays its CEOs millions and millions of dollars. They exist to get funding from Chrome to look like there is competition in the industry.
