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Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

janbambas.cz

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Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#101

Post by twhb »

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.

Yet, many big, profitable websites take 10-30 seconds to load on even the fastest connections. We can reconcile the theory later, but the fact is, much of today’s internet doesn’t optimize for load time.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#102

Post by notyourday »

codezero wrote: post #68

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…

> 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.

Are you the CEO and do you currently own controlling interest? Because if not, then everything that you are saying is worth about as much as a slice of pizza someone dropped in the NYC subway.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#103

Post by zaphirplane »

coolspot wrote: post #64
thephyber wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or eclipse which gets unloved projects

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#104

Post by notyourday »

marten-de-vries wrote: post #2

Interesting approach. I hope more browser vendors will adopt it. It comes with an additional advantage: if a website still needs to function when tracking domains are delayed a second or so, they likely will function too with said domain completely disabled (e.g. using extensions). Sounds like a win from a user perspective.

I have an even better approach:

uBlock origin + noscript

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#105

Post by zaphirplane »

mquander wrote: post #22
OnlyRepliesToBS wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the identified trackers' requests are.. merely delayed? Wowwie! It's a great justification for building a database of perceived trackers though. Lots of useful info to slurp. A better idea: DO NOT LOAD TRACKERS PERIOD. EDIT: Look how the crowd treats alternative opinions. Can't have that, can we?

There's an opt-in "tracking protection" checkbox in Firefox you can click that doesn't load them at all.

Hmm doesn’t it send a do not track cookie, tracker JS is still loaded and discretionary

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#106

Post by jasonkostempski »

nasredin wrote: post #35
korethr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the reason I put that statement in quotes. A tag seemed like it set an unduly negative tone to the rest of the post.

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

I'd prefer everyone on the internet just figures out that sarcasm doesn't work well with text. Make a podcast or video if you must use it. Also "[something], err, I mean [something else]", doesn't work when we all know you have a backspace key.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#107

Post by cookiecaper »

marten-de-vries wrote: post #28
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…

I agree it would be great if other browsers implemented this as well, but you lose me at: > The best thing Mozilla could do is convince Apple and Microsoft to give up their independent lackluster browser implementations and ship Firefox as the default instead. Multiple independent implementations are of vital importance to the web. We've seen it with IE6 before, and having two browsers is cutting it too close.

The "independent implementations" aren't worth much if nobody uses them. Chrome already has a majority of the market share at ~60%, with Safari, its nearest competitor, trailing far behind at ~15%. Firefox is sitting at 9.3%. [0]

Combining IE/Edge, Safari, and Firefox still leaves Firefox at half of the market share of Google, and that's still a distinct disadvantage, but it's a much stronger fighting position than single-digit market share. Google and Facebook are not naive upstarts and it won't be easy to quash them, especially not when little old Mozilla is running on comparative fumes compared to a couple of the best-capitalized companies on the planet.

Google and Facebook's interests are aligned as both base their business model on profiling and reselling data derived from user behavior, so it's unlikely that Google will feel inclined to implement desired user protections against that business model.

It's very important that we have strong competition representing a diversity of interests, especially when the dominant player's business model is just "slick spyware". Without a competitor in the same league, consumers don't really have an option.

[0] https://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php?year=2017&month=11

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#108

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

marten-de-vries wrote: post #9
michaelmior wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean that browsers implementing this will force website owners to make their sites work with tracking domains delayed? This does seem like a nice side benefit.

Yes, that's my hope. For the income of website owners it is better if they all collectively block their site until the trackers are fully loaded. But if only a few do so, users might avoid their site, so individuals are still encouraged to support delayed loading. I imagine Mozilla is in a similar situation: if too many websites block, they will have to disable the delay or start whitelisting trackers if they do not…

I think it's not quite a normal prisoner's dilemma, because it's not boolean. The browser can be less aggressive initially, pushing against only the worst cases, then become more aggressive over time to make site behave better.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#109

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #106
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

I'd prefer everyone on the internet just figures out that sarcasm doesn't work well with text. Make a podcast or video if you must use it. Also "[something], err, I mean [something else]", doesn't work when we all know you have a backspace key.

I'm not going to record a video just to reply to HN comments;)

And we all know what is meant by "X, er, that is, Y"; it's even used intentionally in verbal language.

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