In a swipe at Chrome, Firefox now blocks ad trackers by default • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by Proven » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:23 PM UTC

brianpgordon wrote: post #147

richthegeek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose if he wanted to donate to a diversity campaign, he'd donate to one directly. Wikipedia is a big one for this: the donation campaign is all about 'keeping our servers running', and then huge chunks of the spending goes on community feelgood stuff. I've nothing against diversity campaigning but if you were to treat donation like any other 'purchase' you'd be pretty miffed if you thought you were ordering a ch…

> I suppose if he wanted to donate to a diversity campaign, he'd donate to one directly. This interpretation of his comment is... generous. I agree that there's a legitimate point around wanting your donation to go specifically to browser development and not overhead or other side-projects, but it's pretty clear that he was using the word diversity contemptuously.

So what if he was?

Everyone should provide a disliked example of their choice to illustrate their disapproval of discretionary spending of donations meant for product development.

You're welcome to use your examples, and they may be diametrically opposed to his. We don't have to permit, approve or agree.

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

#362

Post by jshowa3 » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

RobertRoberts wrote: post #320

jshowa3 wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Development of code is not, strictly, a technical action. Otherwise, how would you know what to develop unless you discussed the requirements of the customer? Discussing requirements with the customer, or even within your team, involves several facets of industry, including diversity. For example, if you were trying to construct an app to measure diversity, you would need to know what category to measure, how to meas…

Are you saying that Mozilla's only social development is asking questions and "getting requirements"? And I entirely disagree that programming code /requires/ any social interaction at all. You can do it purely alone in a basement with no contact with anyone.

Yes, if you're making your own product. If you're not making your own product (ie. company development), then it's not purely a technical exercise.

Even if you're making your own product, you at least want to get market data and/or customer feedback once you release it. Otherwise, what's the point of selling a product if your customers don't like it?

And I'm not saying that gathering requirements is Mozilla's only social development. I'm saying that you underestimate how much social involvement there is to development, especially on the organization level, where code isn't purely technical.

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

#363

Post by jshowa3 » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

martin_a wrote: post #336

jshowa3 wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem with restricted fund is that the organization is forced to put it in a place where it may not be needed and they cannot use it elsewhere, even in the case of emergency. So lets say you donated specifically for development of module X. What if a server died and it was in desperate need of repair? What if they need to hire Y person that had good talent for module X? People could construe the funding for intervi…

Those are made up reasons. If you have a solid definition of what is needed and what not, this is no problem at all.

Please tell me, how is server dying, need immediate replacement "made up"? How is a flood disaster in organizational building "made up"? Sure, I made them up on a whim, but they're based on real scenarios that restricted funding may not cover.

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

#364

Post by parliament32 » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:39 PM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #328

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 worka…

Users have never cared that your site tracks them -- it's pretty well known that every web server ever logs pretty much everything. The problem is with third party tracking: I'm happy that you know what I'm doing on your site, but I'm not interested in you shipping that data to Google, who will then sell it to a few dozen advertisers, who then combine it with other sites' data and build some sort of profile against me.

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

#365

Post by parliament32 » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #24

shadykiller wrote: post #3

Switched to Firefox a few months back. Havn’t missed Chrome at all

I work at Google, but use Firefox for all my private things... Except when I run into a page that's broken in Firefox. And except when I need developer tools. And except when I need the browser to translate sites for me. And except when I'm shopping, as Google does a good enough job with payment details. And except Google properties, because who knows what weird HTTP 3.7 will Chrome use to save some ocean boiling?

>a page that's broken in Firefox

I honestly don't think I've seen this in years, and I load thousands of pages weekly. My adblockers break sites sometimes, but not FF. What kind of weird-ass sites are you visiting?

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

#366

Post by mrmuagi » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

jancsika wrote: post #352

newscracker wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that funding for "a tiny feature" or fixing "one tiny bug" would be beyond what most users can pay for at an individual level and still have the developer make a decent living. All the work that's desired to be done needs collective donations to be pooled and used since individual donations would be very small by nature.

I'm addressing a single HN poster who seems genuinely puzzled about how to target their support directly toward improvements to the FF codebase. You've jumped to discussing an imagined general purpose digital payment pooling system that works at scale.

Your suggesting feels good at a personal connection scale (i.e. you fixed my bug painpoint, have some dosh), but really to get the sort of traction where the donations are viable you'd be working at a much larger scale right? Plus, why should the donator does each do this all headwork? Charities make it easy to donate for a reason, it increases donations... Specifically on the topic of scale, if the donations are small enough to not run into this problem, they are probably too little to impact anything, hence scale matters if the donations do.

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

#367

Post by jshowa3 » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:45 PM UTC

gnode wrote: post #359

jshowa3 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most donations, you're donating to the product as a whole. There's no way to ever know where your money explicitly goes. At least I've never seen a charity operate that way. Even if you did donate to development, development is not averse to administration, marketing, hiring, and diversity. And developers are not spending time at Firefox getting the product in the hands of people so it can get better with feedback…

That's unfortunately often how it is, but it doesn't need to be that way. As an example, Ubuntu's donation page allows you to select how you wish your contribution to be allocated: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop/thank-you FOSS foundations should (and typically do) accept code contributions that aren't restricted to their leadership's agenda, so why should they not accept financial contributions beyond their agen…

Because a restriction on code contribution makes sense due to the fact there's often only one area where the code makes sense. If it doesn't fit the vision of whatever the code is trying to do, then there's no reason not to restrict it.

Financial contributions affect all areas of the organization and the needs/wants of the organization changes daily, some times spontaneously. People simply donating to "writing code" doesn't make an organization function. There has to be some sort of PR. There has to be some sort of administration. There has to be marketing, quality, distribution, etc.

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

#368

Post by fouric » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:47 PM UTC

fnord77 wrote: post #351

> The block might appeal to users, but is potentially worrying to publishers Yes, let's have pity on these poor publishers who are relentless infiltrating and measuring our online lives so they can squeeze a few more bucks out of the data grab. Trackers have gotten insidious. I have privacy badger and on one particular news site there were 36 distinct trackers. And somehow they're still getting around the blockers be…

Wired is a (particularly) tracking-reliant publisher, so I'm not particularly surprised that they adopted this tone.

I also hope that any sort of tracking-based business model goes extinct. Unfortunately, in the case of online publishing, consumers have repeatedly rejected micropayments (most recently Blendle[1]), which I believe is the only viable alternative.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

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

#369

Post by parzivalm » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 5:57 PM UTC

ecmascript wrote: post #220

parzivalm wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, you are definitely oppressed at work for making a sexual joke. Let's ignore the fact that that joke may be seen as harassment of others in the office. You shouldn't be called a Nazi, but if you are contributing to an intolerant culture then the company you work for has a perogagitive to get rid of you. And you are probably downvoted constantly because you are spewing beliefs and opinions that scream, "I…

I never wrote anything about being oppressed lol. I never even mentioned work, just community. A lot of open source projects utilize the same rules. If you so much as make a single dongle joke, you may be excluded. I always say whatever I believe, even if I am at work. If the company would fire me over a joke then fine I wouldn't want to work there anyway. So far I haven't met any issues on that front. Also I don't w…

> Obviously people here don't value or respect my opinion for example.

While it may seem like that, people aren't valuing your opinion that involves beliefs or views that can inherinitly make groups of people feel discriminated against. A person that identifies as non-binary or gender-fluid would not feel comfortable being around your opinions.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions and beliefs, but when you say whatever you believe you have to understand the potential to be disliked because of that.

People constantly view your dongle jokes or whatever as being insane that you can't make them anymore, but the thing is even before it wasn't socially acceptable, people still were made uncomfortable by it.

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

#370

Post by TheArcane » Wed, Sep 04, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

aldanor wrote: post #199

Started using Firefox half a year ago because of a single plugin: TreeStyleTab - which lets you keep a tree of your tabs in a sidebar on the left (I tend to keep a hundred or so open all the time). I have no idea how I've lived without it for so long... Since then, Firefox has been gaining some momentum + performance and add tracking, surely not planning to switch back to Chrome/Safari anytime soon.

TST seems to break with my use of multi-account containers - which spawns tabs in different containers depending on the website