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Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

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Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#61

Post by xg15 »

marten-de-vries wrote: post #33
legohead wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This shouldn't be up to the browser. He even notes edge cases where this performs unexpectedly -- unacceptable. If this is such an issue and can actually be a performance increase, then someone should release a script with the same functionality. Or optionally make it an opt-in option in settings.

They do not violate the relevant specification. They just implement it in a way that has not been done before with the user's convenience in mind. That aside, your position is unrealistic: browsers regularly break non-spec conforming websites. They actually monitor such cases (telemetry) and try to work with popular websites to fix the issue before they ship the breaking update, but it's a tradeoff that is regularly…

While the actions were beneficial in this case, that argument would be more convincing if the spec itself weren't a constantly moving "Living standard" maintained by the exact same organisations that also develop the browsers. And even that spec is sometimes consciously broken in an "intervention".

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#62

Post by rotrux »

chowells wrote: post #60
Rudism wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what article you read, but this change in Firefox is simply a change in the timing of requests to certain domains that are known to be for tracking/analytics in an attempt to improve the load time of websites. If anything this move is anti-Net Neutrality since it's prioritizing non-tracking domains over tracking domains as opposed to treating all domains equally.

It cannot possibly be anti-net-neutrality, because it is an action being taken by the user agent, not a transport.

@Rudism actually convinced me you're correct (in spirit) unless there is some other portion of information we're missing. However a client-application is not the same thing as a user-agent. Just because their software is on my laptop does not mean I'm in control...What makes you think client-side requests preclude this being about net-neutrality?

Latency is additive...regardless of what layer we're talking about. increases in transport latency can be compensated for at the physical or application layer...time is time, the OSI model isn't involved.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#63

Post by cookiecaper »

nol13 wrote: post #46
cookiecaper wrote: post #21

This is the ground on which the war against Google, Facebook, et al is fought, but open-source solutions like Firefox are going to need to find a better way to monetize if they want to win. All this does is firm up the resolve of user identity resellers like FB and Google to see that Firefox gets destroyed, and it demonstrates why tech eventually all boils down to platform control. With Facebook code intruding into e…

take all the tracking away sure, but lets leave react out of this.

Well, that's just the thing. Facebook's control over React means it won't be left out of this. Why do we think that they invest in this? Every company wants to integrate themselves as an irreducible dependency in your processes and systems. Facebook doesn't get any money for letting you use React, and they no longer get the value of using it as a kludge to allow them to more easily steal the intellectual property of small inventors (not that they needed anything extra on that front anyway).

The continuing value added to Facebook's bottom line by React is in granting influence far outside of their natural scope. Could they counter Mozilla's move by introducing new React "features" that Mozilla simply "can't support" yet, even though they "really super duper hope the new featureset can come to Gecko-based browsers next year"? Even more insidiously, could there possibly be some little snafus in their QA process that let bugs that affect Gecko-based browsers go unnoticed?

That's their leverage, that's their retaliation against Apple and Mozilla's moves to stymie their flow of user behavioral data. But, I'm sure a company whose revenue stream is wholly predicated upon reselling user identity would never do something "shady" like this to prevent competitors from blocking their access to the data that forms the lifeblood of their product, right?

... Right?

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#64

Post by coolspot »

thephyber wrote: post #41
flukus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trouble is the amount of popular websites that simply don't care how long the page takes to load, 30 seconds would be acceptable to many as long as they get their advertising dollars. Users won't know who to blame. They might blame the site but they're just as likely to blame Firefox, Microsoft, their ISP or a virus. There needs to be a display saying "hey, this site is slow because it's tracking you in 15 different…

You're not thinking about this from a game theory perspective. Slow down pages -> more users bounce -> fewer ad impressions -> less ad revenue.

Also possible scenario is

Slow down pages -> more users frustrated with Firefox -> fewer user share -> Mozilla closes and donates all code to Apache Foundation.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#65

Post by nasredin »

ovao wrote: post #55
nasredin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OT. I think we need to standardize the sarcasm tag on the Internet. Not one of those RFC that no one implements, but something concrete, perhaps baked into the HTML standard. (If the W3C include DRM, they can include sarcasm). Or maybe something like ISO, but people ignore them too. /S

There’s actually a special character for this, unfortunately not in Unicode, called SarcMark. http://www.sarcmark.com

Thanks.

There was recently a NYT article on trying to get a ballet shoe emoji (high heel shoes & sexism related) into Unicode.

Sarcasm should be in Unicode!

---

>Sarcasm, Inc. was formed in 2006 to pursue this idea, and with a great deal of effort and undying support from family and friends, the punctuation mark for sarcasm came to life.

This is why America is the greatest country in the world!

Sarcasm Inc even has (sarcastic?) shareholders and apps!

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#68

Post by codezero »

I work for an analytics company, this will affect my snippet – I don't think it is a big deal, but I'm going to benchmark it on a few sites. From what is described here, it may actually help us. When folks throw tons of tags into their site, we're all competing against each-other as well as the site's own loading – it makes sense to prioritize the site's rendering.

I think of this as no more invasive than pre-caching stuff in a page when you see links that are likely to be clicked, or any other browser optimization.

I may be pounding my fist later if the results don't look great, but ultimately, I think Mozilla's heart is in the right place.

I can think of tons of ways to work around this if I thought it was a real issue, I don't. People who want to block analytics, trackers, ad networks, etc... know how, and this doesn't feel like it is targeted at those people, or even squarely at the tracking pixels.

HN-pre-emptive-defend-myself: My company doesn't share or sell data with third parties (it's in our TOS – and could obviously change in some Orwellian future, but we'd have to update the TOS), it's the customer's data, they can use it in the same way they'd use any other data they collect. We don't do cross-domain tracking, or aggregate behavioral information across customers, and the way we've built it, it makes it pretty hard to tie any two visitors together across sites if you were to hypothetically acquire our dataset. We're also working on building tools to comply with GDPR and wipe out data per-request. Anyways, I think a lot of very bad actors have made the space have a bad reputation and I don't blame anyone for blocking everything, or even for hating my company, or generally all analytics.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#69

Post by fro0116 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #56
paulgb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to. Their brand is that the browser is on your side, I'm happy to have the defaults set accordingly. (Edit: I should add that I think you're asking a very valid philosophical question that my opinion as a user of Firefox doesn't fully address)

From the practical point of view, I am afraid the trackers will respond a way if such a move is made on such a global level. Nobody was fighting AdBlock+ when it was only used by geeks and now as is it has gained so much attention there are a lot of sites that won't work if you use AdBlock+. Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by defa…

> Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it.

This seems to imply that doNotTrack would have been successful for its intended purpose had it not been a default setting at one point, which feels like wishful thinking.

Sure, that aspect made it impractical for uncharacteristically privacy-minded companies in the space to support the header, but the vast majority of companies in the business of tracking and advertising would have ignored it anyways, because there's zero consequence for not doing so.

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