Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#61

Post by m463 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #52

Off topic, but every time I see an article like this I load up Firefox and try it out to see how it has progressed. I inevitably stop using it, and this time I decided to introspect and see why. It turns out that it's mouse wheel scrolling doesn't feel as snappy as other browsers, and for some reason it bothers me a lot. I'm going to try changing the scroll wheel settings and see if I can stick with it.

I've noticed some sites affect scrolling somehow, either because they intercept it somehow, or you scroll over a text box or some other widget and the scrolling targets the box instead of the page.

I think if you can keep the mouse off the page and on the scrollbar at the side (I'm on mac) it scrolls more predicably.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#62

Post by graton » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

ainar-g wrote: post #24

vikbytes wrote: post #15

This is fantastic. I never liked the cookies sticking around forever, and managing them manually was a massive pain if you wanted to keep some of them. Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once.

> This is fantastic. I never liked the cookies sticking around forever, and managing them manually was a massive pain if you wanted to keep some of them. You might like the CookieAutoDelete plugin[1]. It's a recommended plugin which allows you to set a list of domains and domain patterns which retain their cookies while others are deleted. I've been using it for a couple of months now, and I love it. [1] https://addo…

+1

Yes to CookieAutoDelete. Medium was what pushed me over the edge to start using it. Has been working very well so far.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#63

Post by weaksauce » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:19 PM UTC

Yoric wrote: post #19

vikbytes wrote: post #15

This is fantastic. I never liked the cookies sticking around forever, and managing them manually was a massive pain if you wanted to keep some of them. Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once.

> Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once. Is that still the case? I remember that one of the developers was seriously working on improving that.

I remember looking into this and it's a bit of a tangle. some of the oldest code in the codebase I think.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#64

Post by dependenttypes » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

jonnytran wrote: post #20

kgwxd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with parent though, Firefox should just ship with uBlock Origin installed. I think putting privacy features in the hands of a third-party prevents some poor choices being made due to several conflicts of interest browser vendors have.

Luckily, Mozilla is a non-profit organization. Their interests do not conflict with protecting their users. But it makes you wonder, if other browser vendors' interests do conflict with ad blocking, why would they ship with uBlock Origin? They would want to control what most people do by controlling the defaults. The vast majority of users never change the default settings.

> Their interests do not conflict with protecting their users.

Which is why they have things like telemetry, backdoors like normandy, tracking via safebrowsing, unblockable tracking via google analytics in about:addons and any mozilla pages, a great track record with pocket and the mr robot addon, tracking-related bugs which have gone ignored for years, and richly paid executives, right?

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#65

Post by dependenttypes » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #8

dependenttypes wrote: post #5

I never understood this feature. Why not use an addon instead? Ublock origin for example is much better compared to the firefox tracking protection.

> Why not use an addon instead? The general population has no idea such an addon is necessary. I applaud Mozilla including at least basic privacy blocking by default now.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24062478

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#66

Post by m463 » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

tdhz77 wrote: post #23

I keep encouraging people to use Firefox over the others. My efforts keep failing. Mozilla’s focus on privacy is important and should be to others. People have been burned in the past and are willing to give up privacy for something that just works. The irony.

I use umatrix to block stuff and a side effect is that EVERYTHING is much faster.

Some sites routinely load hundreds of items from dozens of third-party servers, so this shouldn't be surprising.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#67

Post by weaksauce » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:20 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #52

Off topic, but every time I see an article like this I load up Firefox and try it out to see how it has progressed. I inevitably stop using it, and this time I decided to introspect and see why. It turns out that it's mouse wheel scrolling doesn't feel as snappy as other browsers, and for some reason it bothers me a lot. I'm going to try changing the scroll wheel settings and see if I can stick with it.

that's funny because in chrome i hate the scrolling because it doesn't have the middle mouse click autoscroll feature and all the "solutions" to fix that are janky webextensions.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#68

Post by xref » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

Hopefully this will make affiliate-link based sites like Wirecutter change their ways. I dont mind them earning affiliate money but I can’t even click a link at Wirecutter anymore since their bounce redirect to Amazon or wherever is totally blocked by my DNS settings originally via AdGuard now via nextdns.io

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#69

Post by gruez » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

Can we talk about how google isn't affected by any sort of mainstream tracking protection? They're not going to be affected by this, because you visit google domains (directly or indirectly) multiple times daily. They're also not affected by blacklists, because they own recaptcha, and that's explicitly whitelisted in in popular blocking lists.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#70

Post by robbyking » Wed, Aug 05, 2020, 4:22 PM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #52

Off topic, but every time I see an article like this I load up Firefox and try it out to see how it has progressed. I inevitably stop using it, and this time I decided to introspect and see why. It turns out that it's mouse wheel scrolling doesn't feel as snappy as other browsers, and for some reason it bothers me a lot. I'm going to try changing the scroll wheel settings and see if I can stick with it.

For a while now I've gone and forth between Firefox and Chrome (Chrome always felt more consistent to me, but I liked Firefox's privacy and security features), but recently I went all in on Firefox it and feels a lot nicer than it did even 6 months ago.

I don't know what changed, but I haven't looked back.