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In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

wired.co.uk

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Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#321

Post by dhimes »

arriu wrote: post #265
paulcarroty wrote: post #263

After couple of days with Brave/Chromium testing on my Linux machines, I definitely should say: Firefox is really SLOW , it feels without any benchmarks. So, Mozilla has two ways: 1. Build a really fast browser. 2. Die as Internet Explorer. It's realistic way to handle things. People don't care about privacy in general, browser is too complex to build for privacy/security activists only. Time to focus on business ins…

It's not always Firefox's fault. Some websites literally serve different HTML to Firefox, Google services are a good example.

I use Chrome for Google properties (GSuite); FF for everything else, including youtube. I find FF works great.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#322

Post by RobertRoberts »

oarsinsync wrote: post #312
RobertRoberts wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying Mozilla does _not_ have social development projects? A specific comment on part of this thread seems to indicate it's part of their charter. (or something, not sure what to call it)

Mozilla explicitly states that they have social development projects. Mozilla is not misleading anyone. The commentor you're replying to explicitly posted[0] this a few comments up as well: > "The direct work of the Mozilla Foundation focuses on fueling the movement for a healthy internet. We do this by supporting a diverse group of fellows working on key internet issues, connecting open Internet leaders at events li…

Thanks, that was the comment I recalled. You seemed to imply that Mozilla was being up front about where the money was being spent.

Do you have any documentation on the budget inside Mozilla? Because I think this would solve the issue of transparency for many people here.

If only a tiny fraction of the money went to social programs, maybe more people wouldn't care. But if it's a significant portion, then maybe they are being misleading. Either way, it would end some debate on the matter.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#323

Post by kerkeslager »

arriu wrote: post #265
paulcarroty wrote: post #263

After couple of days with Brave/Chromium testing on my Linux machines, I definitely should say: Firefox is really SLOW , it feels without any benchmarks. So, Mozilla has two ways: 1. Build a really fast browser. 2. Die as Internet Explorer. It's realistic way to handle things. People don't care about privacy in general, browser is too complex to build for privacy/security activists only. Time to focus on business ins…

It's not always Firefox's fault. Some websites literally serve different HTML to Firefox, Google services are a good example.

That's true, but as with most things, establishing blame for the problem doesn't actually solve the problem.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#324

Post by RandomBacon »

dole wrote: post #314
RandomBacon wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Niether worked on Firefox for Android. One Tab acted maliciously: If you open One Tab, it doesn't show any tabs, so as someone who never used it before, I clicked "bring all tabs to One Tab" think you had to click a button to activate it. Nope, it closed all the tabs instead with absolutely no warning or way to undo it. That's an extremely bad design.

"Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once." Not sure what you were expecting. And on the OneTab page that gets generated, there's a link that says "Restore All" right at the top.

That's not applicable to Firefox for Android.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#326

Post by wutbrodo »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107
newscracker wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the desire to fund one specific project directly (like I get to do with Mozilla Thunderbird where I know I'm donating to that project directly) or at least have part of one's donations go to the development of Firefox. But it doesn't seem like that's possible at all. I have edited my comment above to reflect that. I personally value everything that Mozilla Foundation does (including diversity campaigns) and wou…

Donations have a nice way of revealing value misalignment between the donating and receiving party. Like e.g. I'd like to donate to Firefox, maaaybe Thunderbird, but not Pocket or diversity campaigns. Money is technically fungible, but that works only if it's enough of unassigned money - if N dollars get donated "for Firefox" and then Firefox development receives less than N dollars, I'd feel cheated as a "for Firefo…

"Defeatist and unfair" are bizarre ways to describe it, but I'm not sure how the earmarking process would work: what would prevent Firefox from ostensibly allocating your dollars as donated to Firefox and shifted unconstrained dollars from Firefox to another initiative, with your donation ending up funding non-FF activities relative to the counterfactual? Barring the narrow case where they have more FF-only donations than unconstrained ones, this just seems like an accounting fiction.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#327

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

guerrilla wrote: post #313
drevil-v2 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define diversity though? How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? Say I am a hiring manager at Mozilla and I hire a college graduate from Rwandan not because he is best but because of a diversity quota. What if there is also a Sudanese grad who is looking for a job or a Nepalese transgender MtF? How do I decide at that point? Is it my call and only my call or should there be regul…

> How do you slice and dice and at what point do you say it is done? When everyone has an equal opportunity. You should be able to derive the rest of the answers to your questions from that.

> When everyone has an equal opportunity.

"Equal opportunity" is an unattainable goal, like "utopia". It sounds good in the abstract, but "equal opportunity" is such a subjective concept that it's useless for any practical purpose. Every person's life is as much a product of random chance as innate potential, so there's no objective measure of equal opportunity by which a society that enforces equal opportunity could be judged. (Very much /s, of course.)

The point being that any arguments made against the unattainability of true meritocracy apply just as well to true equal opportunity.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#328

Post by burtonator »

Serious question. Say I have a site and I want to track users. Do I have to just do this via my own HTTP logs now if I want this working with Firefox? I mean this is how it was done in the bad old days.

I have no nefarious intent. I just need to figure out what features my users are using so I can fix them if they're broken.

It would be nice to possibly get some sort of explicit opt-in from Firefox.

I guess one workaround I could have is to call the analytics APIs on my server directly...

Talking to our users their main complaint isn't necessarily that I'm tracking them more that the data is going to Google so maybe the solution is to run mixpanel.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#329

Post by maigret »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #62
estomagordo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could ads benefit users? Obviously, if the revenue that content creators receive from ads came directly from the consumers, the middle (ad) man would be cut out and all others would benefit.

The media is financed by ads to the tune of around 50%. That business is sort of necessary for democracy, as decision-making requires information to close the feedback loop. Therefore, I wouldn't quite so readily cheer the downfall of the industry with nothing more than the typical "be better and you'll find more paying customers" advice.

There used to be a time where ads weren’t synonym with endless privacy breaches though. Lots of content nowadays is niche, and as such can get well working advertising without much tracking.

Re: In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default

#330

Post by kbenson »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #167
kbenson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads are not of interest to users. If you think that's true, then your idea of what constitutes an ad is very narrow, to the point it leaves out a large swath of reality. An ad is an informational transaction between an entity offering a good or service and a consumer that may want that service. When done poorly, it's an exchange neither are happy with. When done well, it's an exchange that both are happy with. We'r…

I think noticing a spectrum is a good first step, but a good second step is noticing the distribution of that spectrum . There is very, very few ads on-line that are "done well". There's also very few ads "done poorly", because nobody in their right mind would want to keep running an ad they're not happy with. The Internet is utterly dominated by ads that are bad for the viewer, and beneficial to the advertiser. They…

My point is really that once we start targeting "ads", and we note that online ads seem to be bad, as you say, then we end up with regulation or legislation about what you can advertise online and how you can do it. But that won't help us when the same techniques then shift towards the real world (and they already are), and then we've got ineffective rules for the new crisis, which is companies tracking you between all the real world locations you go to get a better idea of your interests and what to offer you.

I note it's a spectrum not just to protect some ads. Almost the entirety of that spectrum may be taken up with horrible ads. The important part is identifying what attributes set something acceptable (or even useful) apart from something that is not? Those are the things we want to understand and target, and we'll never even consider them if our approach is "ads are bad". How we frame the question informs our solution. The last thing I want is to replay the spam legislation of the early 2000's (not because I think there was much of a spectrum of spam from good to bad, but because the legislation was laughably ineffective.

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