51–59 of 59 posts
I'm the author of that add-on. Maybe I can add to the discussion by outlining my motivation for writing SDC. I'm currently in the process of compiling the results of an automated crawl of thousands of popular sites that I did last month. I think that every www user should be aware of this: - The privacy model of browsers relies on the same-origin policy. The same origin policy is in practice routinely circumvented by…
Clever idea... makes me wonder why no one came up with this in the past?
Here is how I am using this: 1. Install the add-on. 2. Panic that it has deleted all "not open now" websites' cookies. 3. Choose the option to "Suspend Operation" via the add-on icon. 4. Repeatedly "Undelete" all cookies until it's all done. 5. Keep the add-on suspended. 6. Now, for the next few days, I will browse like normal, but will remember to "whitelist" the websites I like to stay logged-in (Hacker News, Webma…
Thank you for your feedback. I agree that the first-run experience makes for quite the adventure. Until a few months ago, I also considered the idea of starting the add-on in a paused state a no-brainer. After supporting my add-on for some time, however,I'm not so sure about that any more. There's a huge portion of users (probably not HN readers) that would not realize that the add-on is paused. Pop-ups, etc. only go…
I'm really stunned by the amount of development on the tracking side. Cookies, flash cookies, evercookies, local storage, favicons, browser fingerprinting... I'm sure there are several others. It's stunning to me because the amount of redundant ammunition available for trackers seems way out of proportion to how many people actually know anything about this.
Note that I am not trying to justify these techniques.
If this is added to the core (and simplified as mentioned by dotmanish), it can eradicate the chrome fever for good. The same reason why people are using DDG these days(btw, I do. for all my searches other than blockers while coding).
People use Chrome because it's better than Firefox. Much better.
There's another nice cookie manager for Firefox called Cookie Monster: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-monste... It allows you to maintain a white-list of sites that are allowed to set cookies and allows you to pick whether the cookies the site sets are persistent or discarded at the end of the current browser session.
The most important feature is that it's easy and quick.
As I understand -- I'll have to sign in to every website I visit each time? (or manage white-list) Well, then it seems like a not a fit for me. But still, thanks for reminding that I can disable 3rd-party cookies -- I just did that for my firefox.
My buddy Cookie Whitelist has let me decide when I need them on temporarily for years. They're not auto-deleted until session-end, but since I've turned off access, doesn't matter.
I do like the cache-emptying feature. Decided to try what another writer suggested, turn disk and memory caching off.
Please make this non-shocking for non-geeks. Upon the first run, without warning, I see this: " If you read this, all of your cookies that are not currently in use just self-destructed. Don't panic. You can undo this if you prefer to keep them for now. " . . . " Undeletes happen in batches. If you had a lot of cookies, you might need to restore more batches. Click SDC's icon again. Select Undelete (more) cookies from…
Funny you mention it as basic usability. The story on the home page with most points is about usability and they explicitly recommend using undos instead of confirmations: http://goodui.org/#8
Blindly following some person's recommendations doesn't even close to having good UI (or UX). eg. Opting for no confirmation and providing an undo option is an absolutely terrible idea for a 'format disk' button in an OS installer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tracking by abusing the cache is a serious problem. I've written about it before: https://grepular.com/Preventing_Web_Tracking_via_the_Browser... I simply turned off disk and memory caching in Firefox (details in link above) and have been running this way for nearly two years. Browsing the web with cache is not as efficient, but with my ~8Mbit Internet connection, practically, I don't really notice any difference. To…
I am thinking that the RequestPolicy add-on would practically eliminate cache-based tracking by simply blocking all requests to unnecessary 3rd party sites. I would appreciate hearing your analysis of it. https://www.requestpolicy.com/
RequestPolicy would help against this sort of attack when performed cross-site. However, there is still a leak if a site can identify that you're the same user they previously saw. RequestPolicy wouldn't help against this as it's not cross-site.