151–160 of 183 posts
But what's wrong with DRM? DRM sucks, but I don't know why it's in someone's interest to not be able to watch Netflix in their browser.
This gist misleads in a few ways by being so vague and seems to be more about disabling every somewhat useful feature that sounds bad for tinfoil hat enthusiasts. Still has useful things, like disabling Pocket if you don’t want it and forcing newer TLS versions. Others are silly (disabling things that already ask for your permission, like location), dangerous (disabling Google Safe Browsing), or already exposed in th…
Dangerous is a strong word here. Yes, this feature does make browsing the web safer, but I would stop short of inverting that statement to mean that disabling it makes the web dangerous. It primarily protects you from sites engaging in social engineering of some kind: these can admittedly be extremely sophisticated, to the point of fooling most very technical people, but generally speaking it's still mostly avoidable with some care.
I would recommend most people having a safe browsing feature enabled, but I wouldn't fear-monger those disabling it either.
It's also worth mentioning that Mozilla provide their own service here -- Shavar -- so one needn't use Goog
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With the exception of a couple of sites, I rarely turn on javascript. (There are a few sites where the homepage will have just show something like "turn javascript on to see this site"; I just take that as an invitation to leave the site and, if necessary, to search for an alternative.) About the only thing I'm having difficulty with at the moment are TV listings: was able to see TV listings without javascript on zap…
eBay, PayPal, and Amazon are useless without JavaScript, just off the top of my head.
Going beyond what the grandparent post said, JS is a big reason why websites are slow, insecure (from the user's perspective), and time-consuming. Amazon.com's site is ridiculously sluggish precisely because of needless JS. There's nothing about purchasing something online that legitimately needs JS to make that purchase work. You can search for stuff on Amazon without JS but (for all I know) purchasing doesn't work without JS because of implementation choices Amazon made. I'm not so convinced Amazon's prices are all that great, and buying locally is often a better deal for things I buy. The more I learn about how Amazon conducts business (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html for many reasons why) the more interested I am in avoiding them.
If you want to buy new or used books and you want to do business with Amazon, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon and AbeBooks works fully without JS.
I'm guessing there are other places to get items instead of using eBay.
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> for most people it’s fear-mongering about nothing To be fair, a core argument in favor of Firefox is essentially fear-mongering about google and your personal data. It always struck me as odd that actions many people would call "shady" if google does it are condoned in FF because Mozilla.
Mozilla is not the largest advertising company on Earth whose core business is profiling people to package and sell them.
Do you have any proof of this statement?
Google is an advertising company. It doesn't make any sense that they would sell your information to other advertising companies.
Not only does that violate their privacy policy, but it makes no business sense, either.
Is there something like this for Chrome too? BTW I wish I could just disable all features but those basic ones every website uses (and "data URIs" support please!!! I really want to to disable it!) and enable them manually on per-domain basis (the way I do with scripts using NoScript and uMatrix).
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Wired, it gives me a location 3 miles away from my house. Smartphone, it want to use GPS. That's kind of cheating, isn't it?
The OP said wifi w/o GPS. Give that a shot maybe?
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If Google is paying what Yahoo was, it's $300 million a year for the default search option on Firefox. Google pays Apple billions to stay the default on the iPhone as well.
So if Google stopped paying Apple, what would they do? Switch to Bing? I'm sure their users would love that
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/25/apple-switches-from-bing-t...
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Software is generally a lot more complex these days, and telemetry data is needed to stay competitive and keep improving. Using Firefox as an example, look at how many improvements they have made over the last 5 years. I'm not here to argue whether we need these feature or if Firefox 2 was the last version of Firefox that we needed. Firefox (or Chrome, or whatever) wouldn't look as great as it does today without lots…
On the other hand Mozilla has frequently quoted telemetry as the reason for removing niche or power-user features, for example Tab Groups and Themes. "Low usage" in both cases. So telemetry doesn't always improve the user experience.
Websockets? Really? Even if they are an ugly hack on top of HTTP, they are too damn useful to be disabled. Let's disable Javascript too while we are at it.
Well, Meltdown proves the formerly-paranoid Javascript rejectors were actually insightful.
Websockets are used for nefarious purposes?
> Websockets are used for nefarious purposes? Websockets were created sedcifically to get clients to transfer data to the server at the request of the server and without the user specifically wanting to send it.
Websockets don't inherently allow anything that isn't possible with other technologies. What they do is make certain data transfer patterns more efficient by removing the need for polling, or for redundant HTTP requests.