Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

protocol.com

241–250 of 295 posts

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#241
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I used Firefox it asked me to create an account and login. It wasn't required nor is it for Chrome.

Firefox suggests an account for syncing and leaked password monitoring, but it's dismissable. Chrome, brand new install, will just take your login to GMail, for example, and automatically use it for syncing without asking.

This is just false. A new Chrome install will not take your Gmail login and use it automatically for syncing. It will prompt you if you would like to use the account for syncing and you can dismiss that prompt just as you can dismiss Firefox's prompt to create and login into an account to sync.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#242
post #45

The aforementioned Facebook Container was an excellent step, but if they really were serious about fixing Internet privacy regardless of their financial backers, they'd ship an official Google Container as well. (A third party developer ships one as a fork of Facebook Container, but it'd be far preferable for a Mozilla shipped one.) They capitalized on the Cambridge Analytica scandal with the launch of that extension…

That's the problem with Mozilla's privacy propaganda, their funding depends on violating privacy, so they can only talk and pretend, but not actually do anything about it. Which makes them look bad, dishonest and fake, when they are talking about privacy.

You’re not allowed to say anything bad about Firefox or Mozilla around these parts without being heavily censored in case you hadn’t noticed :)

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#243
post #127
post #105

It's funny how Mozilla preaches privacy, but if you open `about:config' and count 1) parameters that include word "telemetry" 2) everything that looks like a unique token 3) "mozilla.org" URLs you'll see that the sum is steadily going up with every release. It leaves me under impression that Mozilla is trying to follow Facebook and Google. Lately they removed setting to use a custom page for the new tabs, leaving onl…

telemetry ≠ tracking

Telemetry serves a different purpose than tracking, but they are both collecting data -- and it's the data collection that I object to.

Firefox does let you disable the telemetry with one exception, though. The exception is that they have a special telemetry ping to tell them when someone has disabled telemetry. While that's obnoxious and prevents me from saying "it's perfectly done", that you can disable the rest is head-and-shoulders above pretty much everyone else.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#244
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a "we depend on the biggest enemy of privacy for funding" kind of way?

Being a non-profit doesn't imply any of that. And nobody has ever demonstrated that this ostensible "dependence" has any adverse effects on Mozilla's policy.

It's hard to demonstrate anything if you don't have a control group and can't turn the thing in question on and off. Conflicts of interest are real, you don't need to demonstrate that they are, though it's not clear how much they sway Mozilla's decisions.

And you're right, the non-profit-status doesn't imply that, they could just as well do the same as a commercial enterprise. It would be more obvious that way.

Would Mozilla make the step to ship an adblocker with Firefox? It would certainly be what their users want (the most popular extension by far being uBlock Origin), but it would pretty much decrease their worth to Google to zero, hence kill the funding. And there's your conflict of interest.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#245
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. DownThemAll is something I would describe as "mission-critical". I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another in odd ways such as everything running fine until I open a file with Firefox as the associated program and one version would open but have all the settings from the other version and Portable Firefox refusing to save settings or extensions at all. Using Chro…

>I had trouble getting two different versions of Firefox to not interfere with one another This shouldn't be an issue if you run your secondary instance with -no-remote -profile="your separate profile". >Using Chrome for casual browsing was just less of a headache. That still doesn't answer the original question though. Why choose chrome over firefox, when it has no legacy firefox extensions? Does chrome have those l…

Because they want an up to date browser for purposes that don't require the extension.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#247
post #136

Can they focus on making it perform as well as Chrome? I mean, I support their efforts and all but I am forced to use a chrome based browser because FF has poor windows/sso integration and absolutley horrible memory management. A tab of any tool's webui that does a lot of work with a lot of data will not only bring firefox to a halt but the entire system. I can at least try to use it for soft workloads but you never…

Maybe this is a windows thing? I use Firefox on MacOS and it is more performant than Chrome. I rarely have to restart Firefox. Chrome needs a restart at least twice a day (I use Chrome for google hangouts a lot). This changed recently with Firefox Quantum, which was v69 or v70. I noticed a significant speedup at that point.

On MacOS, Safari is superior in performance and battery life.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#248
post #42

The aforementioned Facebook Container was an excellent step, but if they really were serious about fixing Internet privacy regardless of their financial backers, they'd ship an official Google Container as well. (A third party developer ships one as a fork of Facebook Container, but it'd be far preferable for a Mozilla shipped one.) They capitalized on the Cambridge Analytica scandal with the launch of that extension…

There's the Multi-Account Containers add-on.

+1 on this. I have containers set up for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon logins (and all the apps they respectively own, that I of course do not have perfect knowledge of).

It's quite clunky to set up though. To add a site to a container, I have to open a new tab in the target container, go to the website, check "always open in this container" in the container menu, then open a new tab, then say "yes, always in this container" at the prompt.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#249
post #136

Can they focus on making it perform as well as Chrome? I mean, I support their efforts and all but I am forced to use a chrome based browser because FF has poor windows/sso integration and absolutley horrible memory management. A tab of any tool's webui that does a lot of work with a lot of data will not only bring firefox to a halt but the entire system. I can at least try to use it for soft workloads but you never…

Maybe this is a windows thing? I use Firefox on MacOS and it is more performant than Chrome. I rarely have to restart Firefox. Chrome needs a restart at least twice a day (I use Chrome for google hangouts a lot). This changed recently with Firefox Quantum, which was v69 or v70. I noticed a significant speedup at that point.

Firefox switched to CoreAnimation in v70, which made a big difference.

https://mozillagfx.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/dramatically-red...

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#250
post #142

Using uMatrix really raised my awareness of how bad things are - spyTech is utterly everywhere. I still take the time to micromanage my matrix every time I encounter a new site and it’s ridiculous how long it can take to get a random infested page back to an acceptable level of usability.

uMatrix is better than nothing but I want more micromanagement. I want to be able to block on a per script basis because some sites will load 49 scripts from some other domain and only 1 or 2 will actually be needed to make the page work properly.

agree, I'd love to see uMatrix get more sophisticated.. there are already a lot of sites that simply cannot be fixed
Post reply on HN