Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44% • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#161

Post by devsquid » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:08 AM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #155

devsquid wrote: post #133

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily use the product normally. The world is already significantly divided by wealth. Assuming someone poor even has access to a service like Google, imagine if it was behind a paywall. Could they afford it? If not imagine how much of a life advantage someone wealt…

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

Of course ideally, the country would provide some form of no questions ask aid. But I live in the US and its a very 'touchy' subject. So I must always seek a solution that embraces corporatocracy, believe me I am very much for tax supported wealth redistribution. It has been shown to be highly successful, but its basically a sin in my country.

A/ws even people struggling financially like to relax and enjoy 'content', should this just be a privilege of the wealthy? Without ads it seems like it would be even more so. As for being a solution to their problems, its not ads, but the type of services ads can support. Using a Search Engine as an example again, they are a way to educate and empower oneself. I used a search engine to teach myself programming and I now am a developer. While of course most poor people could never dream of doing such a thing, for numerous reasons. Making content only accessable behind a pay wall acts to strength someone's,without means, ability to compete in the modern world.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#162

Post by Qantourisc » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:17 AM UTC

pdkl95 wrote: post #99

MichaelGG wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla could also implement shims, to make sites continue to work. So if a site breaks because it makes a call to a tracking library but that's now throwing an error, just provide that same tracking library's functions, but obviously they won't do anything. This would at least fix sites that aren't going out of their way to break things.

While the shim idea is interesting, I suspect we could get a lot of privacy and working websites by hard-caching anything that even remotely looks like jquery and all the other well-known js libraries. (and do the same thing for fonts). It's trivial to implement - just ship a list of hashes for every published js library on all the popular CDNs (+ anywhere else that comes to midn), and if a HTTP request returns a fil…

Wouldn't lying be a better option to protect from finger printing ? Like: "what font's do you have" and just return a generic list ?

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#163

Post by tho9Ohx1eo » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:21 AM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #112

chimeracoder wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, which extensions are broken for you? I've been running multiprocess Firefox as well, and every extension that I use regularly still works. The only exception was Vimperator, so I had to write my own extension to give Vim keybindings[0], since none of the others support e10s. I'm curious which extensions have given you trouble, since Ghostery, NoScript, and uBlock all work for me (at least for the mo…

http://arewee10syet.com/ Ad blockers, password managers, and download helpers seem to be the most commonly broken.

ublock origin and umatrix work fine.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#164

Post by Qantourisc » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:27 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #117

ahuth wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that an ad is custom tailored to you is concerning in and of itself...

but people whine when they see ads that are not to their interests either. there is no way to win.

There is: a browser switch/standard: "ask ad-providers to personalize ads" / "use generic ads". Getting anyone to honour that is going to be a big problem though. So we have to implement that on the client side, by privacy protecting measures. (Not sure how at the moment.)

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#165

Post by mrob » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:33 AM UTC

greggman wrote: post #160

oconnore wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

"If I were starting life over again, I am inclined to think that I would go into the advertising business in preference to almost any other. The general raising of standards of modern civilization among all groups of people during the past half-century would have been impossible without that spreading of the knowledge of higher standards by means of advertising." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

That was a time before modern communications technology made it very easy for knowledge of higher standards to spread naturally, and a time of much less dangerous advertising. Advertisers today literally use brain scanners to design adverts that manipulate people most effectively. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromarketing And advertisers have the ability to test and refine their ads far beyond what advertisers of Roosevelt's time could do, using tracking that would be considered stalker behaviour if an individual did it. If advertising reverted to 1930s level there'd be much less need to defend yourself from it.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#166

Post by dedalus » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:48 AM UTC

But it seems likes the data set used was that of top 200 news sites. Its my experience that media sites have around 60% of the http requests made to third parties and hence the reduction you see in load time

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#167

Post by gpvos » Sun, May 24, 2015, 6:54 AM UTC

jdbernard wrote: post #158

gpvos wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would they do that without the ability to use the same cookie? The only way I can think of is to track you by ip address.

Well, for one, they could fingerprint your browser: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

Is that really done to any real extent? The majority of users will have a standard configuration anyway.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#168

Post by zvrba » Sun, May 24, 2015, 7:02 AM UTC

oconnore wrote: post #155

devsquid wrote: post #133

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily use the product normally. The world is already significantly divided by wealth. Assuming someone poor even has access to a service like Google, imagine if it was behind a paywall. Could they afford it? If not imagine how much of a life advantage someone wealt…

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

> The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not.

Is it? Or is it to make people aware of product existing? It's a subtle difference.

I don't own a TV anymore, but when I'm visiting relatives, I do watch it a bit on a rare occasion.

My first impression is that every show is hopelessly interspersed with frequent commercials. I don't understand why they put up with it. I am the master of my attention span, not the advertisers or the broadcaster. If I'm too frequently interrupted, I lose interest and find something else to do. Traditional TV has become a non-option to me, not the least because I don't want to arrange my life after the TV scheme.

My second impression is.. why the hell are they spamming me with their commercials? Yes, I DO know about the f* product, I already DO have a favorite brand, and a commercial is not going to make me switch.

But sometimes, extremely rarely, I do learn about a new product (through any kind of ad -- TV or web) that may interest me and then I look for more information or just buy it to test it if it's something cheap (like, e.g., a new coke edition).

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#169

Post by toephu2 » Sun, May 24, 2015, 7:05 AM UTC

devsquid wrote: post #133

Man, ads are great. They allow content to be targeted towards people that could potentially not afford the content and towards people that might not necessarily use the product normally. The world is already significantly divided by wealth. Assuming someone poor even has access to a service like Google, imagine if it was behind a paywall. Could they afford it? If not imagine how much of a life advantage someone wealt…

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." -Tyler Durden

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#170

Post by mike_hearn » Sun, May 24, 2015, 7:09 AM UTC

silverwind wrote: post #73

Sanddancer wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're very cautiously dipping their toe in the water given the holy shitstorm that happened a couple years ago when they announced they were going to block third party cookies by default. I imagine that doing it this way means they can show metrics that blocking in this way doesn't meaningfully affect bottom lines.

Still makes me wonder why Safari can block third party cookies by default, while Mozilla can't.

Safari doesn't. They advertise that they do but the policy is riddled with heuristic exemptions added in as they tried to fix broken websites. This (IMO dishonest) behaviour is what led to the Murdoch-driven blowup about Google and ad tracking a few years ago - Google was using one of these workarounds when the user had opted in to ad tracking and it ended up disabling more of the safari cookie blocking logic than they expected. This undocumented behaviour then became Google's fault somehow, although really Safari was just not doing what it claimed it would do.