141–150 of 178 posts
>PPA is enabled in Firefox starting in version 128. A small number of sites are going to test this and provide feedback to inform our standardization plans, and help us understand if this is likely to gain traction. PPA can be disabled in Firefox settings.
https://support.mozilla.org/es/kb/privacy-preserving-attribu...
Q: How many people are using a web browser on a daily basis worldwide as their main window to the collective infosphere? A: Billions. Q: What fraction of the corresponding GDP would it take to fund a serious browser-as-public-good initiative that would develop this technology to its full potential without the perverse constraints of adtech business models? A: 0.0001%? Too small to compute? The idea that critical comm…
Meanwhile the incumbent browser vendors profiting from online ads are on the committees that decide what will be the standards.
Have also seen Mozilla supporters on HN claim Firefox must "compete" with Chrome and that this means matching nearly all of its features.^2
For a recent example, see
https://web.archive.org/web/20240713084435/https://www.jwz.o...
(An HN commenter suggested sending Referer: news.ycombinator.com to www.jwz.org may have adverse consequences hence the use of IA)
The tunnel-vision ignorance and stupidity of this comment is over the top, IMHO. Have seen similar comments on HN.
1. I am submitting this comment with a text-only browser that is maintained by a single person and implements only a small fraction of web standards. It does not support ads. There are no "cookie pop-ups". Clearly, such browsers have value. In many cases I find I can access more information more easily and more rapidly than people using larger browsers like Firefox who are constantly battling against the influence of advertising and "web development" just to read some text.
2. The definition of "compete" as used by these folks does not account for the possibility that some www users (cf. web developers) may want less features, not more.
"Google/Firefox claim their tracking features are not "tracking" because they use something called "differential privacy". I don't have room to explain this class of technology, but I sincerely consider it to be fake." Differential privacy is not fake, although quite complex to do in practice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_privacy
The fake part isn't whether differential privacy exists. The fake part is claiming differential privacy can be used by browsers to provide aggregate ad conversion data to advertising networks without providing information that can be linked to an individual. According to Mozilla[1], Firefox's implementaion uses the "Distributed Aggregation Protocol" (DAP)[2]. Individual browsers report their behavior to a data aggreg…
I believe the goal is to infer the impact of impressions which do not require a click or user interaction.
Privacy-preserving attribution works as follows:
Websites that show you ads can ask Firefox to remember these ads. When this happens, Firefox stores an “impression” which contains a little bit of information about the ad, including a destination website.
If you visit the destination website and do something that the website considers to be important enough to count (a “conversion”), that website can ask Firefox to generate a report. The destination website specifies what ads it is interested in.
...
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attr...
Q: How many people are using a web browser on a daily basis worldwide as their main window to the collective infosphere? A: Billions. Q: What fraction of the corresponding GDP would it take to fund a serious browser-as-public-good initiative that would develop this technology to its full potential without the perverse constraints of adtech business models? A: 0.0001%? Too small to compute? The idea that critical comm…
I think the problem is more that the trend over the last 5-7 decades has been to privatise things. The EU (for instance) has rules forcing (e.g.,) privatisation of train companies and postal services. This has caused previously government-owned services to be privatised.
In this day and age, I'd be surprised to hear of any successful case where a non-public good was made public in a Western country. (I'll restrict my surprise to there because of insufficient familiarity with other countries to make such sweeping statements.) Whether it'd be web browsers, water treatment facilities, energy-related, healthcare-related, infrastructure-related, etc.: if it's currently privatised, it will emphatically not revert to public; if it's currently public, it might be forced to be privatised.
You might think about "privatised-but-with-strings-attached" variants, like in California with "carrier-of-last-resort", or in EU with public transport concessions requiring also services that operate at a loss to service small population centers / unpopular hours. Typically, these impose restrictions on the market parties on what they must deliver in order to be granted the concession. That seems like a way to guarantee the kind of service a government would deliver, but by market parties. And it is! But once you encode rules, you can start eroding them. Every new concession tender going out, you can try to dilute such conditions. A bit is enough - every step gained can be relied upon in future negotiations ("you're asking for more than last term"). And, of course, every small step can be argued by increasing costs - because cost will always increase anyway.
The TL;DRR (didn't read the rant): the public commons has a tendency to erode in favour of privatisation. There is pressure to do so, and no real counterpressure to reverse, only to not go too fast.
It is obvious why Firefox does this though; they have no income otherwise like Google does. Firefox users somehow think that using is "supporting" Mozilla/Firefox, but it is not, and they would not pay for the browser, or pay a subscription free. Privacy-friendly ads are a reasonable way for Mozilla to survive long-term -- if they are indeed privacy-friendly. Ultimately you probably either need a clean-room NGO that…
The thing is, you cannot pay for Firefox even if you wanted to*, so the assertion that people wouldn't pay is unproven (but has good circumstancial evidence). I'd still prefer they make a paid version without this crap. * Donations to Mozilla go to a non profit which is separated from Firefox development and has questionable effectiveness in general
Q: How many people are using a web browser on a daily basis worldwide as their main window to the collective infosphere? A: Billions. Q: What fraction of the corresponding GDP would it take to fund a serious browser-as-public-good initiative that would develop this technology to its full potential without the perverse constraints of adtech business models? A: 0.0001%? Too small to compute? The idea that critical comm…
> The idea that critical communication infrastructure must be (directly or indirectly) supported by advertising interests is certainly not obvious I think the problem is more that the trend over the last 5-7 decades has been to privatise things. The EU (for instance) has rules forcing (e.g.,) privatisation of train companies and postal services. This has caused previously government-owned services to be privatised. I…
The private/public border is volatile and heavily contested and by all accounts will forever be a topic of political debate.
But notice how unusual the context of web technologies: Its not that a private monopoly is controlling and selling some piece of web infrastructure (that might, instead, be opened to more competition, turned into a public good etc).
No, what is happening is that a very specific business sector (advertising) is controlling universal communications infrastructure.
A loose analogy would be if a single private oil company would manufacture and distribute all automobiles in circulation - for free, but securing that they can run on nobody else's energy.
The conjectured "public-good" browser is not crowding out any private interests as there is no market for selling browsers. There is a market for advertising but its not competing for surfaces, it owns all surfaces.
Guess what, in this terminally conflicted arrangement you would never see an electric vehicle.
The highjacking of central infrastructure to serve narrow private interests will inevitably reduce innovation and welfare and any techie that is worth their title knows thats already the case.
This gives me impression like what happens to the nuclear weapon proliferation. At beginning, it is an arms race, between US and USSR, between users and advertisers. Either side thinks they can't survive without vanquishing the other. Eventually they realize it is stupid to continue, and reach a point to both step back. I think Mozilla is at the point where they realize it is no longer beneficial to continue the race…
> content creators I consume deserve income from my visit, as long as my privacy is preserved I doubt that most people in these discussions wouldn't agree with that point. The problem lies in the details. Advertisers don't take anything less that complete personalized targeting. We are not in the 2000s era of buying ad space on related websites/forums anymore. The problem is there are misalignment between targeted ad…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also pay for Orion, but can’t use it much until the multi-container support is working well. Right now Firefox is the only browser that does this right. Upvoting you in the hopes that more people in this thread will put their money where their stated principles are and help support a privacy focused browser with clear funding sources so that Orion doesn’t go the way of Opera.
I also used Firefox’s containers a lot. In my case, I often need to log into multiple AWS simultaneously, or at least bounce between them quickly enough to be a major hassle if I had to log out of one to log into the other. Now I use Safari’s profiles to do that. What’s your Firefox use case that Orion doesn’t handle? (Sincere question; that wasn’t meant as “it works for me so stop complaining!” snark.)
Other than that, the browser is pretty amazing. Blazingly fast, support for both Firefox and Chrome extensions, and lots of customization. There's a lot to love about it, and as soon as the two features above land I'll likely be switching to it as my primary driver (on MacOS)
[1] https://orionfeedback.org/d/43-something-like-firefox-multi-...