Suggestion for a future 'Show HN': Send Mozilla an hourly (GDPR|CCPA) data request and notify you if there are any results.
I'd pay a monthly recurring EU$ 0(.|,)99 for that!
Firefox search update
111–120 of 253 posts
Re: Firefox search update
#112Re: Firefox search update
#113Is Firefox being sabotaged from within?
Re: Firefox search update
#114Whoever is writing these press releases for Firefox needs to reconsider their style. By this point in the product cycle, the only people left using Firefox are sophisticated enough to read through this level of corporate bullshit. Either take "privacy first" seriously or take it out of the mission statement, but don't piss on our leg and call it rain.
Re: Firefox search update
#115The main reason I use Firefox is because it lets you deactivate search suggestions and the "awesome bar" will suggest only from history and bookmarks. Not having to go through a search engine for basic navigation is a killer feature, and better for the planet. Chrome does not let you do that for obvious reasons.
Now I am afraid of enshittification, that they will try to shove search suggestions one day and hide/remove the option to deactivate them.
Re: Firefox search update
#116Stuff like this makes me wonder why I still cling to Firefox instead of switching to one of the actually privacy-focused Chromium forks. I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
I still use Firefox because I'd like there to be more than one web browser in the world, but boy oh boy they're trying as hard as they can to get me to quit.
Re: Firefox search update
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't have a problem if the server side is tracking metrics on what queries are being made. When it becomes a problem is trying to associate the queries based on a single user regardless on anonymization attempts. Of course there's no money in that.
Wasn't like 15? years ago with the AOL search data anonymized release that people found multiple ways to connect dots to whittle it down to just one person or a small subset of people? Wasn't this also shown with anonymized taxi-cab data (released in NY?) many moons ago? Would it not be possible with knowing that you are tracking this data to funnel people into doing searches in a way that would reveal things? Direct…
> Anonymized data is not always anonymous, collected server side or otherwise
If anything, I think it's both safer and more accurate to start from the assumption "anonymized" data can be de-anonymized and and require evidence to refute that rather than starting from a place of assumption that anonymization works and then trying to find a way to attack it. In practice, there's just not a good track record of this being done effectively, and I think people should generally be skeptical of whether this is even possible in many cases.
Re: Firefox search update
#118Is there a white-label firefox that I can install that has sane defaults?
Arkenfox, Librewolf, Waterfox among others might be the best bet, plenty of trade offs like updater scripts at times.
Re: Firefox search update
#119So I guess they're building their own index, just like Brave, Perplexity, Exa, and others. A much smaller arms race that seems to be going under the radar of most folks.
Re: Firefox search update
#120Stuff like this makes me wonder why I still cling to Firefox instead of switching to one of the actually privacy-focused Chromium forks. I've been using Arkenfox to turn off all the telemetry/etc but it increasingly feels like a game of whackamole. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
Firefox is still the most secure browser you can get once you've beaten it into submission through hundreds of about:config changes. Last I checked you couldn't even fully disable service workers or WebRTC in chrome.