Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

blog.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 278 posts

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#231

Post by azretd »

iscrewyou wrote: post #85
whizzkid wrote: post #4

It is funny how my browser preferences has changed over last 5 years. 2014 me as a developer had Chrome as number 1 browser for both development and all rest. Firefox once a month just to check cross browser compatibility. And Safari was just installed without me using it. 2019 me uses Safari for everything except development. Excellent power consumption and UX. Firefox for development. And lastly Chrome for all web…

I would love to switch to safari. What do you use for ad-blocking?

I use Wipr both on IOS and MacOS and it’s been great.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#232

Post by floatboth »

rv-de wrote: post #208

Is this setting extending ublock origin or already covered by it?

Mozilla uses the Disconnect lists. uBlock has larger lists that include the majority of ads not just trackers, but they do cover trackers as well of course.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#233

Post by edraferi »

trickstra wrote: post #200
cordellwren wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Profiles are an entirely separate feature that Firefox also has. Setting up separate profiles for every major site could achieve something similar, but that would obviously be unimaginably inconvenient. Containers are like sandboxed virtual browser instances that nullify most methods of cross-site tracking, while also enabling you to conveniently stay logged in to all of your sites. Switching between the containe…

How so? This is exactly what personal profiles do. Keeping a separate cookie jar, local storage, history, extensions. Basically only the browser version and OS related stuff is left to track you. Ok, except if Google tracks browser usage directly. I've been using separate profile for each of the evil websites I have to use, no cookie leaking.

Firefox splits the functionality of Chrome profiles into two different things:

Profiles contain all your settings, history, bookmarks, themes, sync settings, etc. They’re stored in a folder on disk. It’s kinda a hassle to switch between them.

Containers isolate cookies (and other stuff?) within a single tab or group of tabs. It lets you run a specific website or set of websites in isolation from your other browsing activity. This has security benefits, but is also great for logging into the same service with multiple accounts simultaneously.

I was initially annoyed by Firefox profiles because they’re clunkier than Chrome accounts, but was very happy when I figured out that Firefox Containers gave me the isolation benefits I was actually looking for, with some real improvements over Chrome.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#234

Post by floatboth »

floatingatoll wrote: post #24
mostlysimilar wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is related to using scaled resolution in macOS. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1404042 I was able to achieve way better performance by changing this to `true` in `about:config`: gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque Another note, performance seems way better when changing the following to `true`: gfx.webrender.all gfx.webrender.enabled If anyone with deeper understanding of these options has an…

The WebRender team seems to be rolling out very gradually and is, if I remember a recent blog post correctly, restricting based on specific GPUs and specific platforms that are proven to work without e.g. crashing or breaking out various things (like window toolbars). If you set these options, and then later on, you find that your Firefox is super buggy and won't render anything properly and has weird crashes, it cou…

Mozilla is very conservative with rollouts, very afraid of user complaints. Of course that is understandable, but I wish they did more cold-turkey YOLO decisions anyway :P At least they should've enabled WebRender for everyone on Nightly and Beta a long time ago.

My daily driver is Firefox Nightly with WebRender + Mesa-git + FreeBSD -CURRENT on a Radeon RX Vega. Haven't seen any GPU related crashes in months, it's very stable actually.

> reverse them, somehow, assuming that gfx.webrender.all hasn't broken about:config

well, safe mode is a thing, but you can also use MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 instead of the about:config prefs.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#235

Post by floatboth »

pcwalton wrote: post #55
tick_tock_tick wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard of this bug on and off for years now. Clearly it's not important to the Firefox team that Firefox is a viable browser on mac. Every other browser / application seems to be able to work around/with the issues described except them.

I took over a month away from other work I have to do to develop the planeshift crate [1] to solve this exact problem. On the WebRender side, tiling work is advancing quickly as well. OS compositing in WR hasn't landed yet, mostly because work has to be done on the legacy Gecko side to wrangle the Cocoa widgets properly, but it's not true that nobody cares. [1]: https://github.com/pcwalton/planeshift

ooh, the code for using Wayland subsurfs for "DirectComposition" is already there! Nice! :)

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#236

Post by hansen »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #69

It appears this would block pretty much all the major analytics tracking cookies (e.g. Google analytics, mixpanel, etc.) based on the linked Disconnect list, https://disconnect.me/trackerprotection . While I realize that's kind of the point, in my mind there is somewhat of a difference between "the site I'm on is tracking me to figure out how I use their site" vs. "any site I visit is essentially aggregated data beca…

I doubt there are many users out there who care if someones analytics stuff breaks.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#237

Post by scoopr »

MH15 wrote: post #163
whizzkid wrote: post #4

It is funny how my browser preferences has changed over last 5 years. 2014 me as a developer had Chrome as number 1 browser for both development and all rest. Firefox once a month just to check cross browser compatibility. And Safari was just installed without me using it. 2019 me uses Safari for everything except development. Excellent power consumption and UX. Firefox for development. And lastly Chrome for all web…

I've stayed with Safari for all web browsing mainly due to it's fantastic power consumption. Still use Chrome for development, but I find Safari's UX so compelling I'll still have it open for reference. Safari needs a duplicate tab button though.

I duplicate tabs with CMD-L CMD-ENTER combo, which I find passable. I suppose an item in the context menu would make sense though.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#238

Post by deadbunny »

rukshn wrote: post #168
victor9000 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're using privacy to differentiate themselves from Chrome, which will be a sharp contrast once Google cripples adblocking. It seems to be the same move that Apple is pulling with their anonymous login functionality.

Firefox will not going to win with a focus on privacy. Period. It's like a privacy friendly social network can't beat Facebook. Unless Google does something extremely stupid people are going to stick to it. People use Gmail, YouTube, Docs,Google search, Android and all of them are in sync with chrome. It goes hand in hand with your life. Same is for Apple, they make iPhone they have mail they have macos. Everything s…

> Unless Google does something extremely stupid people are going to stick to it.

Like removing APIs used for Ad blocking effectively crippling Ad blockers?

> Everything sync with safari. Makes life easy.

Firefox can send tabs between your devices, not sure if it can sync them in their entirety. Not sure i'd want it to though.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#239

Post by machinecoffee »

imcoconut wrote: post #156
mraison wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s nice to see a bit of Safari love around here. Some sites occasionally break, but I really like the macOS/iOS integrations. SMS code autofill on desktop Safari (via Mac iPhone communication) is pretty awesome.

I noticed this the other day and was very pleased. Also, if you have touchID then you can use it on safari to autofill login credentials. I just wish safari had an active plugin ecosystem like firefox (or chrome) does.

When my bank sends a login token via SMS, Safari can also copy the token out from iMessage and autofill the value - which is quite convenient, but also a little too much for my preference.

Re: Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default

#240

Post by deadbunny »

ghusbands wrote: post #216

There's a huge political problem with protections that are on by default, and that's that opponents (advertisers) can easily argue that they are not the explicit will of the user and hence feel justified in doing whatever they can to bypass them. So this action increases the justification for browser fingerprinting and other dark tracking patterns. The same sort of thing undermined do-not-track headers. The instant t…

Bullshit. If I install privacy respecting software over non privacy respecting software then you have to assume I want to keep my privacy and don't want you tracking me.
Post reply on HN