Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
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Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
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Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#2Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Google.
Use something like Palemoon and configure about:config a bit more and you should be fine. But be very skeptical of Mozilla claiming FF is some privacy enhancing tool. Their plugins ecosystem is also a security nightmare...
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#3Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…
Is the claim that Firefox/Mozilla is in bed with Google sourced by the use of Google for data about safe browsing? Is there any other reason to think this now that they no longer receive revenue from Google?
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#4Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…
Figured I'd post this here since after reading your comment I made an effort to simply make my existing Firefox more private:
Install the "Privacy Settings" Firefox extension. This makes it easy to toggle the about:config options and has handy presets so you don't have to spend an hour reading articles to understand what to enable/disable.
I also tried "Policy Control" extension which is supposed to help prevent fingerprinting, but it didn't seem to work with EFF's panopticlick tool.
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#5Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…
Firefox, at least modern versions of it, does not tell Google which sites you're visiting. It pulls a list from Google and checks against it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Safe_Browsing
And Firefox enables you to turn this off in settings.
Firefox's telemetry can also be turned off. In fact, when you install Firefox, it asks you if you wish to enable it.
And regarding the plugins ecosystem, Firefox is moving away from the old XUL/XPCOM extension model towards WebExtensions, which should be better here.
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#6Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…
Mozilla has very clear, detailed privacy policies for all data it collects:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
You can find more developer-focused information on Safe Browsing and Telemetry:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Safe_Browsing https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry
My understanding of the Safe Browsing feature based on browsing the above is that a list of blacklisted URLs is downloaded to the client, this list is known phishing sites.
> Use something like Palemoon and configure about:config a bit more and you should be fine. But be very skeptical of Mozilla claiming FF is some privacy enhancing tool.
Keeping Firefox secure and making the right tradeoffs for collecting data to make the product better (like telemetry and crash reports) while avoiding using the data for nefarious purposes is a hard job, and I think Mozilla does it very well (disclaimer: I work there, and I see the way people treat and talk about users and their data).
> Their plugins ecosystem is also a security nightmare...
Assuming you mean extensions (aka Add-ons) - it is true that there isn't really a security model around classic Firefox extensions, which is one reason they are so powerful. The current form of Firefox extension is essentially the same as in the 1.0 days, and was intended to keep the browser slim and allow for new non-core features.
Web Extensions are intended as the replacement, they are similar to (and largely compatible with) the current Chrome extension system: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebExtensions
Firefox already does and will continue to support more APIs than Chrome does, to enable more powerful extensions such as Tree Style Tabs.
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#7Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…
If a user is too non-savvy to click a couple of check boxes in Options > Security to turn off Safe Browsing, they probably need that protection. Users this non-savvy are probably already being tracked left, right, and center and an easy target for malware served by advertising networks, and Safe Browsing is the least of their worries.
It's similarly easy to turn Health Report and Telemetry off from Options > Advanced > Data Choices.
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#8[deleted]
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#9Firefox also sends enormous amounts of metadata about your browsing to the cloud and it's very difficult for non-savvy users to turn this off. They call it telemetry and 'safe browsing', but users overlook that every URL is checked against a database of URLs already in Google's 'safe browsing' repository. Firefox is not actually private and their business model can't allow for privacy, because they're in bed with Goo…
If a user is too non-savvy to click a couple of check boxes in Options > Security to turn off Safe Browsing, they probably need that protection. Users this non-savvy are probably already being tracked left, right, and center and an easy target for malware served by advertising networks, and Safe Browsing is the least of their worries. It's similarly easy to turn Health Report and Telemetry off from Options > Advanced…
Ignore the user you are responding to. Their expectations of Firefox are unrealistic and misinformed.
Re: Firefox tops Microsoft browser market share for first time
#10Wow. I remember watching these stats, waiting for Firefox to edge past IE in the 2000s. Chrome really took the ball and ran with it. They had the advantage of seeing things that FF did that really worked (tabs, extensions, find-as-you-type) and the intelligence to iterate on that (multi-process support, a world-class debugger) and a really solid foundation in WebKit (née KHTML).
In a way Chrome was in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of people. If they hadn't launched, Firefox would likely be sitting where Chrome is now, though likely without a bunch of drive to improve things as much as they currently have.
Of course, in an alternate universe where Firefox was #1 and IE #2, we might have had royalty-free video codecs mandated by standards and no W3C-endorsed DRM...