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Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#131
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 have several reasons for not using Firefox:

Font rendering looks non-native on most platforms.

Scrolling behavior seems non-native on most platforms.

The combined location/search bar seems slower, and gives less useful results, than the same feature in other browsers.

Inferior developer tools.

Mozilla's marketing portraying itself as the white knight of the open web is tiresome and contradicted by past behavior. Pocket is still installed by default, and remember the Mr. Robot scandal?

Tracking is easily defeated in other browsers. Besides, if you use Gmail and Google search, and watch videos on Youtube, you've already decided to give your data to Google and you might as well use Chrome too.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#132
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.

FF’s UX around things not related to browsing is slightly worse on all platforms. It’s most obvious on iOS where some of the styles for your “library” just don’t work correctly on iPhone 10’s. I also think their model for managing non-browsing stuff is too complex comparatively. To access many things like history and bookmarks, you need to use the dropdown menu on the right, which has like 30 different options in it,…

I long assumed the slightly-wonky UX in Firefox was due to a mountain of legacy tech debt around XUL and so on that they were still struggling to remove. Firefox doesn't really feel all that native on macOS, for example, though it's not terrible. Chrome/Brave doesn't always feel native, for that matter, but it's not nearly as clunky.

But then I installed the Firefox iOS app, which must surely have an UI written from scratch, and it's just as weird. I'm starting to think that they just don't put enough effort into UX, or perhaps don't hire the right people.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#134
post #130

My friend who works in an adtech company: "Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"

There's a tacit understanding there that their collection and use of data is wrong, or at least that it is against one's interest to have their data collected.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#135
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open source, how can you trust it?

I thought Webkit, the core engine is open source. Or, are you saying Webkit != Safari?

Safari can use Webkit, but Webkit isn't Safari. Basically, if Webkit = Safari, then anything using Webkit would also be equally safe.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#136
post #130

My friend who works in an adtech company: "Protip: Use Firefox instead of Chrome. We get very little data from Firefox users"

Even less data if you use uBlock Origin and possibly uMatrix (which is very high maintenance, but also reveals the utter insanity of the web).

Without an adblocker the internet is such a slow heap of trash that I'd never go back to not using one. This is also one of the main reasons I use my iPhone so little, since it doesn't really have any way to adblock.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm running the same version of Firefox on FreeBSD (firefox-79.0,1) and I don't see this (with http2=true). I'm running 13-current (r363668) and using the 12-stable quarterly packages (FreeBSD:12:amd64/quarterly)

I'm running 12.1-RELEASE-p5 [quarterly], so that's interesting. We should be overlapping somewhat. I inclined to believe that it's just my luck. You need somebody to find edge-case bugs? I'm your stooge.

> You need somebody to find edge-case bugs? I'm your stooge.

I feel like you've just described my life. I don't know if everyone feels like they fall just off the happy path for everything or if I really am this cursed. It's exhausting sometimes.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#138

I'm happy to see stuff like this. I'd be even happier if the tricks to get video to play were somehow canceled. I have adblocker and video blockers, but somehow, news sites have a video that plays. If I scroll off the page, the video pops out into the lower right hand of the page and resumes playing, even if the big version of the video at the top of the page was stopped /paused (which it is by default), and it needs…

> but somehow, news sites have a video that plays This is so annoying, engaging in such obviously obnoxious UX patterns should be regulated and punished with fines when user-intent tries to be circumvented. The "just dont visit that website lol"-trope really doesn't cut it anymore; operating a news paper organization nowadays is such a cutthroat business that you simply can't not do it if your competition does it, th…

It’s the free market working as intended - if most people cared, the first site to stop doing auto playing videos would get more traffic and other sites would follow. As of right now, the benefit of auto playing videos outweighs the cost of pissing off the few users who care.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#139
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, what's wrong with Safari, that you can not trust it?

It's not open source, how can you trust it?

But if you are using iOS, aren’t you already trusting Apple?

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#140
post #19

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.

> Not to mention Firefox is usually brought to its knees when trying to delete large segments of History/Cookies at once.

Nine year old bug related to this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734643

The 'Library' window in general is clearly neglected trash. For instance it still doesn't get themed like the rest of Firefox.

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