Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#1

Post by Vinnl » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:22 PM UTC

Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center
blog.mozilla.org

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#2

Post by dajonker » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#3

Post by bn7t » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

dajonker wrote: post #2

I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.

Website owners can just use the user agent in weblogs to determine this.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#4

Post by ropiwqefjnpoa » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:38 PM UTC

So, FireFox or Brave? I'm currently using Brave and very happy with it.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#5

Post by zaarn » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

dajonker wrote: post #2

I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.

Nobody looks at logs anymore? Strange, those are very useful.

Google Analytics isn't the only analytics tool and as blockers have become more prevalent relying on GA as your sole source of truth is becoming increasingly desperate to worship Google. Ideally you run a simple analytics tool alongside that is lightweight and doesn't get blocked (ie, privacy friendly) as well as running a log analyzer on your apache/webserver logs.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#6

Post by FactolSarin » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #4

So, FireFox or Brave? I'm currently using Brave and very happy with it.

I think Brave is fine, but the important difference between the two is that Brave is Chromium, and ultimately dependent on Chromium development. Firefox is 100% independent, and a true "third party" browser implementation. With Microsoft/Edge switching to Chromium I think that's more important than ever.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#7

Post by zaarn » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #4

So, FireFox or Brave? I'm currently using Brave and very happy with it.

Firefox unless you want to continue to support Google's development of a privacy hostile browser (Brave is after all a Chromium browser).

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#8

Post by dajonker » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

bn7t wrote: post #3

dajonker wrote: post #2

I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.

Website owners can just use the user agent in weblogs to determine this.

Yes they can. But in my experience, at big organizations, the people using Google Analytics are not developers and will have no idea what weblogs are or how they could use them to determine the real browser statistics.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#9

Post by geraltofrivia » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #5

dajonker wrote: post #2

I see one risk for Firefox: if they block all trackers, e.g. Google Analytics, then it would appear to people viewing browser statistics in Google Analytics that no-one is using Firefox, and thus the developers will be told they don't need to test anything on Firefox.

Nobody looks at logs anymore? Strange, those are very useful. Google Analytics isn't the only analytics tool and as blockers have become more prevalent relying on GA as your sole source of truth is becoming increasingly desperate to worship Google. Ideally you run a simple analytics tool alongside that is lightweight and doesn't get blocked (ie, privacy friendly) as well as running a log analyzer on your apache/webse…

I host my personal site (https://priyansh.page) on Netlify and they give me analytics computed from server side logs. [Link to Netlify Analytics](https://www.netlify.com/products/analytics/).

They don't provide a lot of demographic information (even browser used, afaik) but provide sufficient information for my purpose.

edit: I should mention that this a paid feature ($9 a month).

edit2: I do notice a higher number of traffic when compared to some free analytics which work on the client side, and respect Do Not Track.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#10

Post by alexfromapex » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

The new weapon to fight back against the extreme invasion of privacy is exposing the companies and making them accountable. I love this along with the bluetooth warnings on iOS 13.