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Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

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Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#181

Post by nindalf »

lucaspiller wrote: post #171
Feniks wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block ads, analytics and 3rd party fonts. Almost every site works just fine.

I do the same (uBlock Origin) and almost every site works, but there are a still a few I need to whitelist because they do weird stuff, like triggering their own scripts to run from analytics callbacks. Airline and banking websites are a couple of common categories of sites I usually need to whitelist to work properly - that's not really an issue though as they don't usually have 3rd party ads.

I block everything too and sites break so rarely that it takes me a while to link the breakage with blocking of trackers.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#182

Post by XzetaU8 »

fishmeat wrote: post #120
notyourday wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an even better approach: uBlock origin + noscript

Is there much different between uBlock origin vs Ad Block Plus?

"Unexpected results: Adblock plus does not help with system resource utilisation"

https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#183

Post by arkh »

cabaalis wrote: post #133
Feniks wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I block ads, analytics and 3rd party fonts. Almost every site works just fine.

As I'm sure you're aware, many content creators that you are reading the work of fund their efforts via ads. I think this is a happy medium to attempt to improve performance of these pages without denying them compensation.

> As I'm sure you're aware, many content creators that you are reading the work of fund their efforts via ads.

Not our problem if they bet on a brittle business model and don't want to adapt. Even more: the web ecosystem was fun and a with a lot more freedom before the invasion of ad based companies. I don't see any problem with some culling of the politically correct parasites.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#184

Post by quickben »

codezero wrote: post #153
downbloated wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The clue here is that even though you’ve been downvoted by multiple people, they’re all too chickenshit to voice their “legitimate” opinion backing the downvote. The only real interpretation here is that, while ethically, you may be correct, you’ve expressed an opinion that “ stealing is wrong ” among members of the thieves guild.

I get what you're saying, but I also want to assert: we're not in the thieves' guild. I mentioned that analytics as a broad category, gets bunched up with a bunch of very nefarious folks – it's like conflating Tor to The Silk Road and their ilk (of which I have no strong objection, but I am using as an example, since many might see selling drugs as "bad", but Tor as "good"). With that said, the comments above this th…

Unfortunately for the field , analytics is equated with advertising and user profiling lately.

We'll see how this one pans out, but it may be somewhat career limiting.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#185

Post by smsm42 »

dsr_ wrote: post #79
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…

A couple of years ago I went to a conference where one of the speakers outlined his company's web page optimization methods. The big one was to delay executing JS until at least the visible page content was loaded, and all JS that actually implemented customer-useful bits. His example page loaded 94 scripts, which he claimed was representative of many pages.

One of the consequences of installing Ghostery was that it shows a counter of how many scripts are loaded on the page. Turns out I have severely underestimated how many scripts average site loads - and I work in the industry!

As an example, I just loaded CNN site - it has 28(!) trackers and uses 38(!) different domains. And that's a low number because some of these scripts would load other scripts if I enabled them to run...

That's a super-mainstream site, imagine how many more shady ones have.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#186

Post by fb03 »

ryandrake wrote: post #173
edjw wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you explain how you do that? Probably Pi-Hole running on. Raspberry Pi. https://pi-hole.net

Yea, not exactly Pi-Hole, but the same concept. dnsmasq running on router, with a big list of ad-serving domains and hosts resolving to 0.0.0.0

Wow, nice and simple. Is that list available in some repository? would like to implement that since I run a dnsmasq bearing router at my home border as well.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#187

Post by rihegher »

deckar01 wrote: post #15
korethr wrote: post #7

While I like the idea, a potential problem comes to mind. A list of what domains are tracking domains will need to be maintained. The need to maintain that list will possibly move the cat-and-mouse game of ads vs ad-blockers to the tracking list as well. I could totally see Alphabet paying Mozilla to remove analytics.google.com from the tracking domain list (because "it's just analytics; it doesn't track you or infri…

> using data of the Tracking Protection database This database is already being maintained and used for private browsing. I find it unlikely that an analytics CDN will play cat and mouse with Mozilla just so it's script will load a few milliseconds sooner.

Where can we find this list?

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#188

Post by j_s »

codezero wrote: post #147
notyourday wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jesus. Really? Downvotes? Pretend this person worked for facebook and made some statement regarding what the company does. (a) he would be fired on the spot by the company itself ( as he is not authorized to speak on behalf of the company ) (b) he would be laughed out the room because he does not control company decisions The same applies to every single company. Every single one.

Agreed, they make a good point, however, I think the terms of service are binding, and if what we're doing changes, we _must_ update them. This, of course, does not change the fact that we've collected a lot of data and it would suddenly fall under the new terms of service. With that said, I actively delete customer data on request, and a terms of service change like this _might_ (very reasonably) prompt someone to r…

Yes, since new ToS have always been retroactively applied to all previously collected data they offer zero privacy protection over the long term.

Google Has Dropped Ban on Personally Identifiable Web Tracking | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12760003 (October 2016)

An effective opt-out may help most of the vigilant, but it is in the best interest of those changing the ToS to keep it as confusing/hush-hush as possible.

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#189

Post by j_s »

youou wrote: post #160
ryandrake wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An even better approach is to block all ad-serving domains at the DNS layer. If you associate with my home access point and use my DNS cache, you don't get ads period, and you don't have to install an ad blocker or lift a finger.

Can you explain how you do that?

Most recently: November Workshop: Running the Pi-hole Network-wide Ad-blocker, and more | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15608052

Related discussions (click the 'comments' links): https://hn.algolia.com/?query=netguard&sort=byDate&type=comm...

Re: Firefox 57 delays requests to tracking domains

#190

Post by j_s »

paulgb wrote: post #51
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Isn't it anti-net-neutrality? Is it ok to build it into a major browser? I actually block all the tracking, malware, ads, social networks, fraud, gambling, porn (except a couple of porn sites I like :-)) etc domains I could find information about but this is my personal conscious choice, I have manually installed extensions for this and built the lists. Shouldn't other people do the same themselves too if they choose…

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)

> For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to.

Firefox marketing is effective but to be clear they have begun changing direction, pursuing a more practical "attracting the masses" approach (a la Signal) rather than paranoid/hyper-vigilant/engineer-style idealism (something some misinterpret Firefox marketing as still claiming), and as a result Firefox has been forced to course-correct several times due to public outcry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

A recent eye-opener for me personally was discovering telemetry's switch from opt-in to opt-out as of September.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-de... (3 months ago) vs. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_... (3 years ago)

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