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For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

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Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#441

Post by account42 »

pdpi wrote: post #161
cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If this were, say, Adobe, I’d agree with you. HN as a community doesn’t have much clout in the design or video space. This is Mozilla we’re talking about, though. HN is exactly the sort of audience they need on their side. That bunch of nerds is the same group they relied upon to evangelise for them during the IE era.

Mozilla might just have decided that that's no longer the case: that their funding from Google does not depend on nerds advocating for the browser. That is either they came to the conclusion that Google will continue to fund them even if the market share continues to fall or they have decided that the end is inevitable and are just trying to milk the cow for all that she's got.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#442

Post by account42 »

david_draco wrote: post #136
latexr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. The user outcry was utterly predictable from even before the first web article was out. The fact that no one with decision power at Mozilla saw it coming is worrying: either they have zero understanding of people’s concerns for pri…

> What isn’t clear, in retrospect or otherwise, is why companies/apps/services need to keep learning this lesson. They are trying to find a funding model that makes them independent from Google. - Building a fast, privacy-oriented browser that keeps up with web standards and fixes security bugs takes people, organisation and therefore money. Yes, much more than that CEO salary. - No one wants to buy for a browser. -…

If they wanted independence from google they'd cut overhead instead of raising the CEO salary year after year.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#443

Post by nerdponx »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #377
lolinder wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has tried experiment after experiment to try to earn money. Let's try forcing Pocket down people's throats. Let's automatically install Mr Robot. You know what people will love? Full-page ads for a VPN! No one has seen enough VPN ads! The one funding model they haven't experimented with at all is actually asking people to pay for Firefox. Donations or subscription, they haven't even tried it once. And yet peo…

>And yet people will over and over again insist that that would never work. Because it won't. And there is mountains of data to back it up. People will not pay if they don't have to. Some people will, for sure, but to get those some people to carry the weight of "all the people" is totally untenable. Besides, Chrome is "free".

At the same time, even a tiny bit of friction is enough to get people over the mental hump of paying for something.

They could easily gate off certain features behind a paid build, so either you pay or compile it yourself from source. Downstream packagers could of course do whatever they want (eg Debian). However, it creates a minor amount of friction for a relatively large fraction of the user base, and moreover sets the baseline expectation that this is not really "free as in beer", even though it remains "free as in freedom".

See also: Sublime Text, which, despite being closed-source, is 100% free-as-in-beer to use in perpetuity, and yet somehow they make enough money To not only continue development, but even start developing other products (Sublime Merge), even as their brand recognition wanes and their competitive advantage shrinks.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#444

Post by ringer »

blueflow wrote: post #349
kevincox wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And of course this setting doesn't sync to new devices by default. So you need to remember to opt-out on every device. The underlying pref is dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled. I'm going to force this off in my policies.

How do you sync these settings across devices? I need such a thing, too.

Basically, you need to create a `user.js` file in the root folder of your profile, you can find/open the profile folder using about:profiles or about:support (default path is `~/.mozilla/firefox/${profile-name}/user.js`). You can sync it however you like, e.g. upload it to your dotfiles repo and symlink with stow, etc.

The syntax is: user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false); // Disable Privacy-Preserving Attribution

You can find a lot of examples and "documentation" on https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#445

Post by marky1991 »

Klonoar wrote: post #201
closewith wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The days of Mozilla having earned the benefit of the doubt are long gone for most people. The person you replied to made a reasonable point and your response reads as defensive and dismissive. Do you have an interest in Mozilla we should know about?

Eh, I don’t think my comment is defensive. I also could’ve just ignored the comment. I explained to them that I’m open to discussing but there’s nothing to be gained when the comment starts off in conspiracy theory. It’s an open source project, people will 100% notice if they tried to do what the parent comment is suggesting.

I don't see how it's conspiracy theory. Firefox has done exactly this over and over again. (The latest example that annoyed me: browser.proton.enabled =false)

As a user of Firefox, I feel like I'm in a constant battle with Mozilla/FF to disable every new bad idea they have. Every time I'm forced into a surprise update I didn't ask for/try_to_install, something gets worse. This isn't an unusual state for commercial software, but Firefox is supposed to try to not be commercial.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#446

Post by yogeshp »

noisy_boy wrote: post #405
defulmere wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for providing these instructions. My usual way to get to some setting in Firefox is to use the search box but it seems that Mozilla is actively hiding this one by excluding it from search, ie if you type "advertising" into the settings search box then there are no results.

That is because "Allow web sites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement" doesn't have the word "advertising" in it. Granted the current phrasing a bit awkward and may have a certain degree of deliberateness behind it.

Yes, but the section name "Web Site Advertising Preferences" has the word Advertising in it.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#447

Post by nerdponx »

pndy wrote: post #352
lolinder wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has tried experiment after experiment to try to earn money. Let's try forcing Pocket down people's throats. Let's automatically install Mr Robot. You know what people will love? Full-page ads for a VPN! No one has seen enough VPN ads! The one funding model they haven't experimented with at all is actually asking people to pay for Firefox. Donations or subscription, they haven't even tried it once. And yet peo…

> asking people to pay for Firefox I do expect that's the next step at Mozilla - locking features behind paywall with some premium plan. Cloud sync probably will fall into that basket. And if that eventually won't work - they'll surely announce it's time to "sunset".

Personally, I think that's what they should've been doing all along. If it doesn't work at this point, it's because it's too late, and they've already burned enough of their credibility that people don't want to give them money anymore.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#448

Post by pbronez »

NayamAmarshe wrote: post #339
southernplaces7 wrote: post #232

One of the few things about Firefox that made me attempt to tolerate its repeatedly slow, shitty performance and tendency to slow my whole device down, was the privacy angle. With that gone, why bother? Might as well use Chrome. At least it's light and fairly quick.

https://privacytests.org

huh. Maybe I should try Brave again.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#449

Post by tgv »

Sammi wrote: post #156
tgv wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't hold your breath. It takes ages to develop a browser that's as fast as Firefox. CSS and JS are no joke.

Ladybird more than doubled their js performane in five months between january and may and are now about 2x as slow as Safari: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1790098727081836697 Things are progressing faster than you'd think.

First, that's uncompiled/jitted. Second: the 80/20 rule.

Re: For advertising, Firefox now collects user data by default

#450

Post by tgv »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #167
leshenka wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you got any suggestions?

HTML only (with forms). Client side css only. No JavaScript. No cookies.

That's not acceptable for 99.9% of the people, so they'll stay on their current browsers. An alternative must be attractive to succeed.
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