Six and a half years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15931730
This is in their DNA.
Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
201–210 of 221 posts
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#202Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
True but Firefox is mainly written by people who want to earn a living. Much FOSS is actually written by people who are being paid to do it, How do you fund the producers of Firefox and the infrastructure needed to get it built and released. Currently the only way is that the sellers of the adverts you read give money to fund Firefox. Now if you paid for Firefox then they don't need to get money from advertisers. Sim…
> Currently the only way is that the sellers of the adverts you read give money to fund Firefox. According to Wikipedia[1], most of Mozilla is funded by Google, for setting them as the default search engine, rather than by more conventional advertisers. On a more personal note, I'd prefer if that money went towards improving their FOSS offering instead of giving the now-former CEO a $7M bonus[2], acquiring advertisin…
Yeah I think the biggest problem is that Mozilla was made a corporation, and as such has corporative aspirations and mindset. It would have been much better if it had remained just a foundation.
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#204The scare quotes here are uncalled for: it is privacy-preserving. The approach allows measurement without disclosing who, specifically, did what with the ad. The best objection to these proposals isn't privacy, it's that a browser vendor is lifting a finger for advertisers. I guess the fundamental question there is if we prefer to outright shut down online advertising, or give it the tools it needs to be less bad. Op…
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Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#205I suppose I should finally switch to Librewolf. I really don't like Firefox forks, for the slow updates and because I do genuinely use some bleeding edge features, but I'm tired of Mozilla.
Are the updates really slow?
No, the updates are not slow. I've been running Librewolf for years now, no major complaints. FYI I'm on a rolling release (linux) distribution, but I doubt that changes much. If you are comparing it to stock Firefox, there is no competition (Librewolf is imho just more enjoyable experience); if you are comparing it to Chromium (and other Chromium-based browsers), in my experience the biggest 'problem' is the lack of support for pwa's. Anyways, give it a try.
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#206I'm curious (I know nothing about the tech): is this "privacy-preserving ad measurements" too complicated for the EU investigate and for law-makers to understand (is that the point)? Or designed to get the most data in the most GDPR-compliant way?
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "served as web pages" is a bit misleading. It just means that the UI layout engine takes HTML or XML, not that information is passed through a web server.
Sure, but the link concerned all telemetry, of which accessing a web page, even just to show what's news, is one. The overall attitude included comments like 'I would like to see significantly more anonymous telemetry not less', while I want no network connections in my mail reader except that which I specifically initiate. These are people so acculturated to data collection that they don't understand that some other…
There are organizational incentives to this approach - at Mozilla / Thunderbird, with which I have a bone to pick; but also elsewhere.
A couple of years back I was involved in an argument about doing something a bit similar in LibreOffice:
https://design.blog.documentfoundation.org/2022/11/01/commun...
Note the back-and-forth in the comments.
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#208As a loyal user, I didn't quite see this coming. Under `Browser Privacy`, I have `Enhanced Tracking Protection` set to `Strict`. I had studies turned off, when I go to `about:studies` it explicitly says: "No new studies will run.". I have `Tell web sites not to sell or share my data` checked. I have `Send web sites a “Do Not Track” request` checked. It seems like Mozilla still thought it was okay to automatically add…
The new leadership has made it an ad company.
Is this the final form of all tech companies now?
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chromium is still a thing, I use it at work, considering all the corporate-ware that gets installed into Chrome by default now. Waterfox and Librewolf seem to exist, and I imagine there's more Firefox forks out there. No idea on the state of things though
doesn't chromium still phone home to google though? Don't you have to use something like brave or ungoogled chromium to stop that from happening?
Hmm, I'm not sure in what capacity Chromium phones home.
I definitely have no ability to setup Google account sync nor did it play nicely out of the box with the Chrome web store, so I assumed not? But I haven't done my own tests
Re: Firefox 128 enables "privacy-preserving" ad measurements by default
#210I've been using Firefox for more than 20 years since the Phoenix days, even when it was cleary slower than Chrome (it still is but the diferences are minimal ) I'm not acting surprised, but I think it's more than time to start looking into a viable alternative. It's "Chromium" (?) still a thing? Do you guys know if there is a browser based on Firefox that doesn't have any of the BS Mozilla is putting into their brows…
I use Librefox [1] on desktop and Mull [2] on Android. They're both basically patch sets applied to Firefox that remove tracking, proprietary blobs, and come with better defaults for privacy. [1] https://github.com/intika/Librefox [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.fennec_dos/
Librefox was last updated 5 years ago!?!?! You probably don't want to use that.
Try https://librewolf.net/