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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

#261

Post by Jonnax »

criddell wrote: post #238
jdashg wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! We at Mozilla certainly don't see that! I'm at 815 tabs in this window alone and switching is instantaneous. Did you happen to file a bug report about this atypical behavior?

FWIW, Firefox is slower for me on certain pages. I keep Chrome installed for things like Google Docs. For example, in the word processor, it tries to save the document every few keystrokes and Firefox will hang for 5-10 seconds whereas on Chrome it's so fast it isn't noticeable.

Well we know that Google would put elements on YouTube to prevent Edge from using hardware acceleration.

So there might be a factor there. But perhaps it could be an add-on. I discovered that Lastpass injection feature to autofilled had a performance impact.

Switched to Bitwarden and it was noticibly faster.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#262

Post by fauigerzigerk »

rattray wrote: post #239
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't use an ad blocker. I know all the arguments for ad blocking and I agree with many of them. I know what difference it makes in terms of performance and annoyance. But I just can't bring myself to indiscriminately block all ads, knowing how important they are as a funding source for the websites I use. There's only one thing that destroys privacy even more thoroughly than ad targeting: payment.

Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing what sorts of websites you use that you feel this loyalty towards? News, community, educational, etc? Is it a small group of sites, or a wide variety?

It's a wide variety of sites. Local news, tech news, science mags, other special interest sites, porn, discussion forums, Q&A sites, some social media. It's impossible to list them all.

Essentially, it's the great variety of what's available on the open Web that I don't want to lose. I don't want everything to become one big app store with all its suffocating narrow-mindedness and oppressive control freakery.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#263

Post by xvector »

stiray wrote: post #248
typon wrote: post #130

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

Protip #2, for what cant be traced using conventional methods, they will use fingerprinting and those add-ons take care about most common methods of fingerprinting - canvas, webgl, fonts and audio: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/canvas-finger... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/webgl-fingerp... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/font-fingerpr... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-…

Firefox already includes many of these, some of those plugins are redundant or unnecessary.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#264

Post by danShumway »

mancerayder wrote: post #104

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…

Short version of a long story! A few years ago Google implemented autoplay blocking in Chrome. It was designed to fix problems like this, but was riddled with issues.

I wrote about it at https://danshumway.com/blog/chrome-autoplay/. The spec evolved a little bit since then, so not everything in that post is up to date, but most of the core problems still remain (or did the last time I checked).

Firefox was forced to follow suit, and to their credit their spec was a lot more sensible, but it was really only papering over the problems in the Chrome spec. It wasn't at a fundamental level thinking about video/audio differently than Chrome was, it was just trying to do the same thing minus the egregiously bad decisions.

I feel like a lot of the problems with hijacked interactions on the web can be traced back to spec histories like this.

A good implementation of video/audio blocking:

- wouldn't reveal to the page that audio was blocked, it would either silently mute the audio or refuse to render the video without reporting an error.

- wouldn't have exceptions based around trying to interpret user intent or (in Chrome's case) exceptions based on how you navigated to the page.

- wouldn't try to distinguish between things like GIFs, animated backgrounds, and videos (they're all moving pictures that use data and distract motion-sensitive users, you don't need to treat them differently)

My (subjective) opinion is that video autoplaying never really got better because we never really tackled the problem correctly from the start, and since then we've just been continuing to apply band-aides on top of a fundamentally broken strategy.

> am I the only one?

Depending on how much you hate this and how much effort you're willing to put into getting rid of it, disabling 3rd-party Javascript will fix the problem on most news sites.

Nearly all of them that I run into load the Javascript to run the player from a separate script being served from a separate subdomain or CDN. It's usually possible (even for news sites that require Javascript) to block that script in specific, or load just enough Javascript to get the page rendering and nothing else.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#265

Post by cpeterso »

godelski wrote: post #155
nitrogen wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only downside is that product managers who rely on third-party analytics to decide what platforms are relevant will never see Firefox+uBlock users as relevant. I've had to argue this at multiple companies; fortunately at some places multiple developers used uBlock so it wasn't as hard as making the case alone.

> fortunately at some places multiple developers used uBlock so it wasn't as hard as making the case alone. Is adblocking not common? Every tech literate person I know uses an ad blocker. I'd say about 30-40% of millennials I know use them, most using ADB or uBlock Origin. Every time I see someone using a browser with ads I forget what a nightmare the internet is.

These sites claim the percentage of US web users using an ad blocker was 25% in 2016 and 27% in 2017:

https://www.businessinsider.com/30-of-all-internet-users-wil...

https://www.statista.com/topics/3201/ad-blocking/

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#266

Post by tgb »

I'm trying to get myself to finally switch to Firefox thanks to this post. But I'm having problems with ctrl +/- changing of font sizes. In Chrome, that setting affects one domain only. Here I'm getting confused because I open a new tab and the font is tiny or huge, even sometimes on sites I've never visited before. Ctrl 0 fixes it but then I seem to reset sites that I do want enlarged (like HN). What's the logic here? I haven't figured out the steps to reproduce this, it seems random.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#268

Post by UI_at_80x24 »

kelnos wrote: post #177
godelski wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it a software company? I can understand the disagreement, but with the state of things it is just atrocious. I'd be fine if things weren't so invasive and were clearly ads. Pop ups, pop unders, dark patterns to cause clicks, flashy images on text pages, malware injection, 10x page load times, etc are all reasons why I personally can't stand it. It just feels like they are trying to trick me into seeing their p…

> I don't think most people minds ads Is that true? I despise ads and the entire advertising industry. I would wear special glasses that would block billboards from my vision if they existed. I pay extra for the ad-free version of Hulu. When I'm at someone's house and they have cable and the TV is on, I find ad breaks incredibly jarring. Am I just an extreme outlier? It would make me sad for humanity if that was the…

>Am I just an extreme outlier?

No. You are not alone. MOST people don't realize that there is an alternative.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#269

Post by yelloworangefog »

I'm really happy to be using Firefox again. I had abandoned it in favor of Chrome around 2014 because of how sluggish it had been getting. They really got it together with the quantum update though in my opinion. It still gets outperformed by Chrome (especially in the javascript department), but it's not a big enough difference to be a deal breaker for me, and I like feeling like I'm doing my small part to help combat Chrome's growing monopoly.
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