Apple believes in user privacy. Your naïveté is touching.
Well, Apple makes most money with hardware. Unlike Google who makes most money with ads. So at least in theory Apple can more easily invest in privacy. EDIT: Check their last quarter's results, Apple makes only 6% of their revenue with online services: https://www.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy15datasum.pdf
I think they actually get most of their revenue from the App store and iTunes--and in neither of those cases is privacy good for business.
Weird. If browsers can detect these trackers, could an alternative be to just de-prioritize the trackers, so they load last and won't slow down page load time (since I assume they're invisible anyway?)
This should be doable for well-written trackers like Google Analytics that use script tags with the "async" attribute. In fact, those are probably already likely to load after the main content. For ads or trackers that are embedded as img or iframe elements, I think this is also viable and could speed up page load time. For ads or trackers that use inline scripts or non-"async" script tags to load content, the web br…
So does this FF mode that blocks them entirely also risk breaking the pages?
"To enable Tracking Protection in Firefox 35 and later, visit about:config and set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true" Edits - This quote from the article is interesting, especially considering Google the worlds biggest advertising industry company also has a browser. "That Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not an industry-agent"
Way to butcher the quote. In full it has nearly the opposite meaning and it's far more intriguing -
I believe that Mozilla can make progress in privacy,
but leadership needs to recognize that current advertising
practices that enable "free" content are in direct conflict
with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns
-- and that Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not
an industry-agent.
Well, Apple makes most money with hardware. Unlike Google who makes most money with ads. So at least in theory Apple can more easily invest in privacy. EDIT: Check their last quarter's results, Apple makes only 6% of their revenue with online services: https://www.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy15datasum.pdf
I think they actually get most of their revenue from the App store and iTunes--and in neither of those cases is privacy good for business.
> Huberty said that Apple's online services are underappreciated by investors because they accounted for less than 6 percent of the company's revenue over the last 12 months.
This should be doable for well-written trackers like Google Analytics that use script tags with the "async" attribute. In fact, those are probably already likely to load after the main content. For ads or trackers that are embedded as img or iframe elements, I think this is also viable and could speed up page load time. For ads or trackers that use inline scripts or non-"async" script tags to load content, the web br…
So does this FF mode that blocks them entirely also risk breaking the pages?
Yes, it does, though for slightly different reasons. Mainly, it can break pages with first-party scripts that depend on blocked third-party scripts. I've encountered and reported a few of these while testing the feature.
Instead of condescension, please provide some sources and state your beliefs in a productive way.
I think that was more or less the point of the GP minus the condescension bit. Making unqualified statements about what you believe about a large corporation is roughly on par with contesting that particular belief.
Then again Apple has a track record and APIs to put forward. Just about every API in iOS puts privacy first. If you want e.g. location data, the API asks the user's permission -- including with Apple's own apps.
I would love for Mozilla to find other means of funding online content besides advertising. In either case I'd love to see them take a hard stance on privacy and against tracking. They should block trackers that have no effect on website features and restrict and monitor the ones that do effect features. ...and this is another reason Mozilla needs to have their own search engine. They could have much greater influenc…
Do you think Mozilla has the resources to compete in that space, regarding Google's dominance?
It seems that even Bing is unable to gain meaningful market share.
It's interesting to think of this as a nuclear option for Firefox. The only incentive they have not to turn it on immediately is that it could poison relationships with site owners such that they stop testing their sites on Firefox or outright block Firefox users, but if Firefox market share ever diminished to the point where site owners were already neglecting Firefox then I see no reason why Mozilla wouldn't damn the torpedoes, start aping Chrome's UA, and turn this on by default. It would be a compelling value proposition at the expense of a lot of mysteriously broken sites (though I wonder how many of those sites would be just as broken for Chrome users running AdBlock). It's also literally the only feature that Chrome can never, ever, ever, ever gain, due to obliterating Google's revenue model (which, actually, makes it intriguing to entertain the notion of Microsoft and Apple following suit for precisely this reason).
I find it very, very hard to get outraged over analytics code on a web browser site. And as previously mentioned every time someone brings up this idiotic factoid, Mozilla's use of GA isn't exactly standard.
You find it very, very hard to get outraged because you either use GA yourself and do not wish to acknowledge your complicity in the matter or you've simply failed to make the obvious leap from analytics to clickstream data. Google wants to know what web pages you visit, when, and how often, and a GA beacon that phones home that information placed on every web page is the easiest way for them to do it. EDIT: there ar…
> why they offer to host frequently requested assets like JQuery
Let's not forget the Google Fonts, which exist to "make web beautiful". How adorable and altruistic. Yay! /throws-confetti
I'd also like a comparison with ublock and/or ghostery. It appears that this becomes enabled after the blocking plugins.
ublock is more about ads, and this is tracking. While they usually come hand in hand, Facebook ads (eg: while on facebook) don't add additional tracking.
Depends on the list installed, If you have Easyprivacy installed then you're covering both sides.