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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

#301
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome offers this quiet magical feature called ‘tab to search’, Firefox allows you to make custom search key shortcuts but you need to make each of them. It’s just not as easy to use and is a killer feature that’s very fast/useful and missed for anyone who uses it and tries to switch away to Firefox. It’s the only thing that keeps pulling me back to Chrome, as well as many others I’ve seen discuss it in forums over…

I just have duckduckgo as my default search engine, that way I can use the bangs to search almost any site that's even remotely mainstream by starting my search with !w (wikipedia), !y (youtube) !hn (hacker news), !g (google), etc.

There is related functionality built-in to Firefox (since basically forever) you can assign keywords to any installed search provider and then search that specific search engine by prefixing your search with the keyword you assigned. So you could assign !g directly in Firefox options and Firefox will take you directly to Google for that search (no need for the intermediate duckduckgo).

You can add things like YouTube etc as well so long as they have "OpenSearch" metadata. (Presumably what Chrome is using for "tab to search"?) [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#302
post #130

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

Couldn't that also be because Firefox has a higher percentage of expert users than Chrome, which has pretty much become the default browser, would.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Would be way too hard to solve something like that with subscriptions.

Maybe one day, concepts like Brave Rewards or Google Contributor[0] will actually work... No idea what it'd take for those to reach critical mass, maybe government intervention.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#304

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.

Percentage wise adblock users or Firefox users total to about 10% of users so it really depends on the target user demographic to say whether or not you need to specially account that those users aren't being reflected. Coding tools probably. Game for a social website probably not. Also depends on the financial model, if it's primarily ad based then the group of users you don't have good ad data for isn't something y…

While that number may be true you have to keep in mind that more than 50% of global FF users are based in DACH and by extension the rest of German speaking Europe (i.e. Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Switzerland).

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Po…

> Inferior developer tools. Very much an opinion, I prefer the Firefox dev tools, especially with the recent changes. And while I can’t speak for other OS, scrolling and font rendering looks native on Windows and has for years.

I find most people that complain about Firefox dev tools other than just not knowing where the cheese is stored often just need slight tweaks to their sourcemaps. That problem is self-reinforcing because so many developers only test in Chrome that some of the biggest tools in the ecosystem (webpack, for a big for instance) default to sourcemaps that only work in Chrome, when they could just easily produce sourcemaps that work in both.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#307
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.

I seem to remember reading something about a year ago about uBlock Origin being a security concern (like harvesting user data or something). Am I misremembering?

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For people with a lot of tabs, I recommend trying a Vertical Tabs add-on. I am currently using Vertical Tabs Reloaded, but there are a couple different ones. Usually people have plenty of horizontal space and you have a scrollable sidebar with all your tabs in it.

Thanks, but I'm looking for something that doesn't require scrolling - where I can see all my open tabs at the same time, no scrolling, clicks, or other interaction required. I toggle between tabs a LOT, and having to scroll or otherwise navigate to find the right tab is a hard no for me.

The Firefox search also searches open tabs a lot. Which could be even quicker than using the mouse. There is a limit on Chromium browsers - tabs smaller than the favicon aren't really that useful.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#309
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.

There are two solutions I’ve used:

1. Content blockers for safari are sold in the App Store. Not bad.

2. A private Pinole instance on a vps. Just set your phone to connect to it. There are turnkey docker installs of this now.

Neither are perfect / have quirks. I def recommend pinhole. I thought it would be a pain to set up, it wasn’t and it’s great.

Re: Latest Firefox rolls out Enhanced Tracking Protection 2.0

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Setup a pihole and point your iPhone DNS settings to that. You can use wireguard to tunnel to it when you are outside of your home network

Or just use NextDNS: https://nextdns.io/

Not much setup or configuration needed.

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