This is very exciting, but it seems it's just building in partial uMatrix functionality. It's really becoming a pain to have so many overlapping tools doing the same thing.
I'd like to challenge your attitude on this. Does it not make sense to have your browser handle this out of the box? Personally I'd rather have overlapping functionality for a bit while we work toward a sane browser by default than the alternative which is maintaining some number of extensions each with their own configs etc...
This is very exciting, but it seems it's just building in partial uMatrix functionality. It's really becoming a pain to have so many overlapping tools doing the same thing.
> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release.
Default settings can move the industry in a way that opt-in things like uMatrix generally don't.
Agreed. Setting up blacklists is just whack-a-mole. I'd be more interested in detection of actual fingerprinting techniques, such as system font enumeration using canvas, or WebGL GPU fingerprinting. It would be technically possible to detect the creation of WebGL or canvas contexts that aren't actually rendered in the layout and prevent data gathered from those contexts from being sent in any XHR payload. I'm sure t…
I couldn't help but read the headline and think to myself: This is great! I should probably jump right in to this .001 % bucket of Firefox nightly users. Combined this with my >1% OS, custom profile of barebones unsupported, blocked, not installed client technologies and then they'll really never get my fingerprints!
If you enable resistFingerprinting, Firefox reports a "standard" user agent. Without that, your Nightly user agent probably makes you trivial to track.
> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release.
While lots of people here already have uMatrix or other blockers running, blocking fingerprinting and cryptomining domains by default would be a big step!
This is very exciting, but it seems it's just building in partial uMatrix functionality. It's really becoming a pain to have so many overlapping tools doing the same thing.
> In the coming months, we will start testing these protections with small groups of users and will continue to work with Disconnect to improve and expand the set of domains blocked by Firefox. We plan to enable these protections by default for all Firefox users in a future release. Default settings can move the industry in a way that opt-in things like uMatrix generally don't. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)
That's why I said this is exciting. For normal users it's a big win, and that has much more potential to move the industry.
In collaboration with Disconnect, we have compiled
lists of domains that serve fingerprinting and
cryptomining scripts. Now in the latest Firefox
Nightly and Beta versions, we give users the option
to block both kinds of scripts
Isn't this something that content blockers like umatrix already excel at? Why put it into the core of Firefox?
I would prefer to see Firefox giving more power to extensions. For example, it is still impossible to make an extension that makes a typed in url use https per default. Because it is not possible for an extension to know if a network request stems from the user typing it, using a bookmark or one of the other many ways a browser can be triggered to do a network request. So typing urls in Firefox keeps being dangerous because it will load the url per http by default.
I do appreciate the feature! But how feasible would be to limit the amount of info retrievable from the JS layer instead than relying on a black list of domains serving fingerprinters?
I am not trying to diminishing this post, just want to point out that a great way to increase adoption would be to make a better and simpler-looking UI. A great deal of users prefer Chrome for this reason.
> The average user doesn't even know about fingerprinting Yet. Give it one or two scandals, maybe involving a heavyweight like Reddit, and users will be aware of what fingerprinting is and why it's not in their interest to have their digital fingerprints taken, analyzed and stored every time they enter the internet equivalent of a grocery store. Give them analogies they can understand and they will feel like they're…
I care about security, fingerprinting, etc... but most people don't and they don't want to learn about it. They like pretty looking things, pretty looking apps, pretty looking browsers... Apple designs have proven this, there are cheaper products with the similar features yet people want Apple. You would think everybody knows this but Windows still looks like shit. Google has improved their design system a great deal. Logitech realized this and improved its designs a few years ago, now ask them about their sales. Better usability, simplicity and design will increase adoption. It's not an opinion, it's an overlooked fact.
This is very exciting, but it seems it's just building in partial uMatrix functionality. It's really becoming a pain to have so many overlapping tools doing the same thing.
I'd like to challenge your attitude on this. Does it not make sense to have your browser handle this out of the box? Personally I'd rather have overlapping functionality for a bit while we work toward a sane browser by default than the alternative which is maintaining some number of extensions each with their own configs etc...
I agree with you. I'd be very happy if they announced that all uMatrix functionality was being added to the browser. I'd be happy to have overlapping functionality for now if that's the future.
My biggest disappointment is that this doesn't do anything new. My secondary disappointment is that this will make my life a little harder when I can't get a website to work. I hope you're right that this means I eventually won't need to install a plugin for uMatrix functionality.