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Make Firefox Private Again

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Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#111

Post by bjord »

takluyver wrote: post #60
bravetraveler wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That offer to refresh always seemed a bit strange to me. It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done. Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application. Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This should…

I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance. I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.

it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat

the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#112

Post by pessimizer »

LunaSea wrote: post #97
lpcvoid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't care if 90% of websites which rely on advertising disappear or replace their monetization strategy with gated, paid access. I even think this is a good thing. As such, I will fight the ability of websites to monetize by tracking wherever I can.

This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet. Also most people don't want to pay for content. This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

> This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet.

No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet.

And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.

> This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them. The US seems like it's on the verge of state licensing of speech and journalism, and that sentiment is easily moved to any sort of internet hosting of any service.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#113

Post by mrweasel »

jart wrote: post #92
mrweasel wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The awful thing is, I'm not sure they can. It might be one of those things that are extremely painful at first, but becomes better when things have settled down. All that sites that have turned to clickbait and scammy ads, wouldn't we be better of without them? If the ad market where to collapse the real newspapers, who still have actual subscribers would still be around, things like the BBC and other local and tax…

It's not a problem if you don't go to the parts of the web that have ads. I spend my time online on places like GitHub that operate as ad-free commission-free gift economies. Environments that have ads, have nothing that I want. I don't care about what happens in them any more than I care about what happens in shantytowns. Why do you care? What pulls you into those dark Internet spaces?

That's a fair point, but I care also care a great deal about society as a whole, and I feel like the ad model is damaging to those around me. I quite frankly don't get why TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook and others are allow to manipulate people to spend hours doom scrolling, just to show ads. TikTok even knows this is bad, because that's not how they operate in China apparently.

I see very few ads, my daughter sees even less, but when I see how easily an ad can manipulate a child I question why that's even legal to create that ad and what kind of sick people thought that it would be an acceptable business strategy. Adults doesn't fair much better, the only way to see how awful it truly is, is to block out all ad funded media for an extended period of time, then come back and feel the assault.

The ad based economy is making the world worse. It promote scams, pollution, gambling, pushes people into debt, hurts the mental well being of young and old and creates division between people.

I don't like online ads and the web they've created.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#114

Post by Hard_Space »

zczc wrote: post #29

More privacy-related about:config settings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_...

Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined here.

There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings.

Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#115

Post by nottorp »

LunaSea wrote: post #110
nulbyte wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure? Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation. When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, wh…

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money. Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by. The content shared…

> which didn't have the volume

agreed

> and quality

filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#116

Post by LunaSea »

pessimizer wrote: post #112
LunaSea wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet. Also most people don't want to pay for content. This just means that 99.99% of the web will instantly disappear.

> This means that people without means will automatically be excluded from the internet. No, they'll be relegated to the charitable internet, the advocacy internet, the nerdy obsessive internet, the public science internet, the FOSS internet, the public domain internet, and the piracy internet. And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar sca…

> And whenever any of these groups come up with a project they want to do, they won't have to ramp it up to billion dollar scale in order not to be drowned out by a terrible and loud commercial product. There will be plenty of broke users looking for alternatives.

They absolutely will have to since they won't have the means to serve the content to the community otherwise.

Niche websites won't stay niche for very long if they are the only free option.

> I think the only risk of this happening is if free alternatives get so generous and useful that the commercial internet tries to raise the price of bandwidth somehow, or of running a server in general, or alternatively by lobbying for expensive regulatory stuff to get governments to do their dirty work for them.

I don't see most of these free alternatives even existing in the first place. For example: free news reporting (not even talking about foreign correspondents & co).

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#117

Post by immibis »

spondylosaurus wrote: post #27
mrinfinitiesx wrote: post #4

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base,…

I don't wholly disagree, but it's always a tad ironic to read "money is ruining the free/open internet" discussion on a free forum powered by VC money.

the relationship this forum has to the VC is similar to what a lot of forums had to their operators. There is little direct revenue gathering here - the VCs make money in other ways and spend a small fraction of it on this forum. At most, they advertise their other activities sometimes. The whole web used to be like this.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#118

Post by cassianoleal »

nottorp wrote: post #115
LunaSea wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, where people pull out all the stops to rake in the dough as the primary means of earning money. Yes and on this young Internet your site had 100 views, mostly from people close by. The content shared…

> which didn't have the volume agreed > and quality filming with an 8k camera doesn't mean quality though, it just means more production/hosting costs...

Agree. Production quality != overall quality. I'd much rather have great content badly produced than professionally produced crap.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#119

Post by bjord »

kelnos wrote: post #15

This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow. Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.

I just did a quick search of your comments on HN and I see that you're regularly sharing/using links to archive.is in an effort to bypass paywalls.

So, given that you're unwilling to pay and that you believe advertising is unethical, how do you expect people to fund the content you consume?

Don't you think it's unethical to expect they do it for free?

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author%3Akelnos%20archive&type...

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#120

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nulbyte wrote: post #107
LunaSea wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you say that the infrastructure costs are secondary? How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure?

> How do you think that the video content is going to be stored and served if not through paid infrastructure? Secondary doesn't mean nonexistent, it comes after the primary thing, content creation. When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content. Creation was the primary motivation; costs were a secondary concern. I think it resulted in more and better communities than today, wh…

> When the Internet was younger, people willingly paid for privilege of sharing content

This silences a large number of people and communities who can’t afford that privilege. Not saying that’s inherently bad. But it’s worth weighing in the moral calculus.

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