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Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

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Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#41

Post by jakemal »

thrwn_frthr_awy wrote: post #37
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.

This sounds like a risk for using Google Analytics to me. If your analytics suite isn’t representative of your site’s traffic and users, maybe you should look for a more ethical platform/solution?

Are there more ethical platforms that don't get blocked by default for Firefox users?

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#42

Post by zelly »

lukebitts wrote: post #31
zelly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Mozilla had any sense of the future, they would start working on Brave instead of Firefox. Chromium already won on technical reasons. Now someone needs to professionally maintain a privacy fork of it.

What are those technical reasons?

JavaScript engine optimization

Devtools

Every benchmark: https://arewefastyet.com/linux64/overview?numDays=365

Anecdotally, Firefox uses a lot more CPU, memory, and battery. Makes sense since the JS engine is so much worse. In this era the browser is just a VM for JavaScript.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#44

Post by diafygi »

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…

Does anyone have a list of self-hosted server-side analytics tools with conversion funnel tracking?

The only self-hosted one I can find that has a funnel feature is Matomo.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#45

Post by giancarlostoro »

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.

That's only effective against client-side analytics. There's also the user-agent from the client sent to the server. This is sent in most (all?) requests.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#46

Post by Spivak »

oarsinsync wrote: post #15
zaarn wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nobody looks at logs anymore? Apparently not, as one other comment on this site lists one of the apparent benefits of using cloudflare as that they provide "the exact numbers on how many people requested or visited my site" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21243135

(Not speaking to CF specifically.)

I think we need to nail down what we mean by unique visitors -- we're talking about an estimation which pools from many different sources to calculate as best we can the number of different real human visitors. There is good data in the server logs but if that's your only source of data then your estimation is going to be coarse.

This can be good enough for certain applications, and is plenty for sites with simple access models but you do lose information compared to what you get from client-side tracking.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#47

Post by veselin »

zimbatm wrote: post #12
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.

Or just actively punishing Firefox because blocking tracking is also blocking ads, which is their revenue model. Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue? If Firefox becomes the bastion of privacy sensitive people it will become more and more like Tor users, all tainted with the same labels. I mean it's already the case that recaptcha will more likely trigger on Firefox than Chrome, aski…

As far as I remember, when websites were doing window pop-ups and Google toolbar removed them, they didn't block the toolbar users. So, the risk is low... unless Firefox does something stupid like full ad-blocking.

But if something like this happens, I will be happy to build/use an extension for the other browsers that makes such websites invisible in all major social networks.

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#48

Post by vezycash »

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #29
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #21

The downside of all of this is that I feel like sites are now intentionally being designed to break if this kind of stuff is blocked. I used to be able to use Firefox Focus (which has tracking protection built-in) to pay most of my bills. This was convenient because I would just open up the one site in FFF, pay the bill, and then close it, with all browsing history automatically deleted. In the past month about 3 of…

The more I protect my personal data (hi, GDPR!), the more websites are adding recaptacha to all their pages. Blocking trackers makes Google suspicious, so they're adding more and more recaptcha challenges to let me pass their tests, sometimes 5 to 10 in a row. I'm now working for Google's IA for free just to be able to make purchases online, access some services that I already paid for, or filling in support request…

Use Buster captha solver addon

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#49

Post by re4ctor »

dmortin wrote: post #30
zimbatm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just actively punishing Firefox because blocking tracking is also blocking ads, which is their revenue model. Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue? If Firefox becomes the bastion of privacy sensitive people it will become more and more like Tor users, all tainted with the same labels. I mean it's already the case that recaptcha will more likely trigger on Firefox than Chrome, aski…

> Why spend money optimizing for a browser that doesn't generate revenue? Maybe sites will move to a model that you'll be offered to pay for their services if you block trackers. So you'll have a choice of paying with your data or paying with your money. Either way someone has to foot the bill at the end. I guess in this case most users will let trackers work instead of paying.

That then gets into the ethics of should privacy only be for the wealthy

Re: Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center

#50

Post by kgwxd »

lprd wrote: post #25

This is great! On another note, I'm wondering when I can remove uBlock Origin?

Don't, ever. There's no reason to trust Mozilla will keep this up forever. They're not even close to doing what uBO does. Blockers are best kept as a third-party solution with no conflict of interest. If too many people stop using uBO because the FF built in tools are "good enough", eventually we'll loose proper extension support and we will be at the mercy of browser vendors again.
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