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Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#161
post #83

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

I run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?

I run Pi-Hole on my network as well; it's wonderful. I'm terrified that it will stop working soon though, as companies start to use their own DNS servers, which I've heard is happening.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#163
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely it’s important - Just because one hole is still open doesn’t mean another shouldn’t be closed. And FF and Safari should continue their work to close any fingerprinting opportunities Fingerprinting is becoming less effective over time - for example fingerprinting on iOS is pretty unsuccessful.

Yes, I agree. Do you have more information about how iOS is blocking fingerprinting?

While it has some native anti-fingerprinting protection (including automatically deleting third-party cookies every week), the main deterrent is homogeneity: you can be sure that the browser/device is Safari on iPhone 12 Pro Max... and that's it. In other words, unlike other devices where you can get what GPU is in the system (WebGL and Canvas), the resolution of the screen, the list of fonts installed by the user (indirectly, by testing them), list of webcams and sound cards on the system (WebRTC), how many (logical) CPU cores are there (WASM), whether the device has a battery (Battery API), and the laundry abuse of APIs that exists means that it is possible to individually identify desktop users and (to a certain extent) Android users.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#164
post #28

Tracking has become so bad that it seems like users have to spend money (more bandwidth) to protect themselves from it. Crazy and sad to see where we've come :\

Nobody would accept interconnected face scanners in every building they walk into but online it's somehow okay.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox takes privacy so seriously that they fail to detect you are on Firefox, if you are using Firefox!

But not seriously enough to remove Google Analytics from their website.

Google currently pays for Firefox development. Are you ready to be the money source instead?

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#167

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

I'm going to be inevitable in the opposite direction: I don't think cross-domain requests were actually saving that much bandwidth. The common use case I could think of that would be JavaScript CDNs. The problem with that is that JS libraries update frequently - even something really common like jQuery has hundreds of releases, all of which get their own separately-cached URL. So the chance of two sites using the same jQuery version is low. Keep in mind that public JS CDN URLs are rarely refreshed, too - it's more of an indicator of when the site was developed rather than the latest version the site was tested with. So you could hit hundreds of sites and not get a cross-domain cache hit.

Even if you did share a URL with another site, the benefit is low compared to what you can do with same-domain requests. Most sites should be served with HTTP 2 already, which means even unoptimized sites should still load decently fast as requests aren't as expensive as they used to. You can get almost all of the same bandwidth benefits from a cross-domain cache by just making sure your own resources are being cached for a long time.

Re: Firefox 85 cracks down on supercookies

#168
post #83

These advertising networks are destroying web performance. Most of these "Supercookies" are optimizations to improve performance. By abusing them, advertisers have turned what should be a great performance tool into a liability. I know FF suggests this won't significantly affect most websites performance, but web advertising and trackers are already responsible for a huge chunk of performance issues already. Of cours…

I run a network ad-block dns (pihole) and consistently 25-33% of all my network traffic is blocked as ads. It's much more than I ever imagined. Now I'm used to a different internet, when I'm using internet off the network it's like WTF is this?

25-33% of requests? Or is this a percentage of bytes?

Because I wonder what percentage of bandwidth (in terms of bytes) trackers/banners/ads account for.

Need to set up a pi-hole ... just too many other projects....

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