Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44% • Hacker News Board

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#251

Post by arh68 » Sun, May 24, 2015, 3:23 PM UTC

devsquid wrote: post #212

toephu2 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need." -Tyler Durden

Ah quote from a movie made by privileged ppl for angsty privileged ppl to think they are smarter than the other ppl in their society. A guaranteed formula for success. :) A word of advice quotes without arguments do not truly mean anything, particularly quotes from box office successes. Watch out I might start quoting Rihanna or Eminem at you! ;D However addressing the quote directly. If Tyler Durden truly had that s…

You didn't address the quote directly. You launch an ad hominem attack at the film creators (privileged ppl), the film viewers (angsty privileged ppl), and finally you criticize the Tyler Durden character. Your post is completely devoid of substantive criticism. Does advertising not have us chasing cars and clothes? Does it not influence us to buy things we previously didn't know existed? You won't say.

If there are specific words or phrases in the quote you disagree with, point them out. If you have compelling, relevant quotes from Rihanna or Eminem, feel free to share them and add to the discussion.

To address the quote directly, I don't see how advertising has us working jobs we hate (unless you work for an ad agency and don't enjoy it).

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#252

Post by quotemstr » Sun, May 24, 2015, 3:40 PM UTC

core2 wrote: post #222

Any modification of content by browser, ISP or any third party should be illegal.

Your view is incompatible with the idea that I should be able to run any program I can write. Personal freedom ought to trump commercial interests. Once your bits arrive at my computer, they're no longer yours. They're mine, and I can mangle them however I want.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#253

Post by core2 » Sun, May 24, 2015, 3:52 PM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #252

core2 wrote: post #222

Any modification of content by browser, ISP or any third party should be illegal.

Your view is incompatible with the idea that I should be able to run any program I can write. Personal freedom ought to trump commercial interests. Once your bits arrive at my computer, they're no longer yours. They're mine, and I can mangle them however I want.

I perfectly understand your position of freedom. However, you should understand that the articles you read, are written by people. They have families to support. If you as visitor are not willing to pay, who will pay the salaries of all writers in the world?

The website is a trader, the visitor is a customer. The trader is agreeing to sell the content to the customer if the customer pays the price - view ads (or pay subscription). The visitor agrees with this and receives the content. If the visitor (with the help of the third party tool - browser or extension) disable ads, the visitor is violating the user agreement.

If this option "Disable Ads" is OK, and is accepted by all browsers, this mean there will be nobody willing to write content, because ads are main source of revenue of most of the websites.

I simply cannot understand how this could work.

For me, it's clear that Mozilla will negotiate with Google and other Ad providers to receive some money to remove this feature.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#254

Post by vinbreau » Sun, May 24, 2015, 3:57 PM UTC

zvrba wrote: post #168

oconnore wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. That seems like the opposite of helping poor people. Also, if you are struggling financially, ad supported "content" is probably not a major concern in your life, and certainly not a solution to your problems.

> The whole point of ads is to convince people to buy things that they may otherwise not. Is it? Or is it to make people aware of product existing? It's a subtle difference. I don't own a TV anymore, but when I'm visiting relatives, I do watch it a bit on a rare occasion. My first impression is that every show is hopelessly interspersed with frequent commercials. I don't understand why they put up with it. I am the m…

I gave up on cable TV 8 years ago. Before that I would always mute commercials, I despise my attention being broken to sell me stuff I don't want. When we had company they would think it was odd at first but then realize how awesome it was to not have an announcer screaming about dirt, cars and fast-food. I have a serious problem now when going to someone's home and they don't mute commercials, but instead try to talk louder over them.

Side note, my wife lost 35 pounds after ditching cable. She noticed her cravings for fast-food and pizza subsided when she wasn't being bombarded with food adverts all day long. TV commercials are designed to tickle your insecurities and then sell you stuff to lessen those insecurities. That was how we were taught in advertising school. Being aware of the tricks still doesn't always work at lessening their impact.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#255

Post by MichaelGG » Sun, May 24, 2015, 4:09 PM UTC

jdiez17 wrote: post #203

MichaelGG wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla could also implement shims, to make sites continue to work. So if a site breaks because it makes a call to a tracking library but that's now throwing an error, just provide that same tracking library's functions, but obviously they won't do anything. This would at least fix sites that aren't going out of their way to break things.

That's a cat-and-mouse game, and the Firefox release cycle is bound to be much slower than any website interested in tracking users. The owners of the site can tweak the JS slightly, the FF devs have to get notified that the website stop working, go back to see what changed, and stage the necessary changes for the next update. And then wait for users to update, of course. It's very impractical.

It's not an arms race for the sites that aren't purposefully breaking. Shims would fix accidental breakage, and reduce "mysteriously broken" sites. Intentional breakage, at least in my limited experience, is accompanied by some warning text about adblockers.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#256

Post by lern_too_spel » Sun, May 24, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

IBM wrote: post #149

lern_too_spel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's comparing Apple to Google. In that respect, Apple comes out looking pretty bad. Google's devices are also encrypted by default and have much more robust protections against rogue applications in place (both static and dynamic automated analysis of apps for malware, vs. just a human eyeballing it).

Android devices aren't encrypted by default, Google backtracked on that. http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/google-quietly-backs-...

Google devices are, as I said. Mentioning that other Android devices aren't is like saying other Linux distros don't use RPM in response to a statement that Redhat does.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#257

Post by lern_too_spel » Sun, May 24, 2015, 4:16 PM UTC

x0054 wrote: post #150

lern_too_spel wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's comparing Apple to Google. In that respect, Apple comes out looking pretty bad. Google's devices are also encrypted by default and have much more robust protections against rogue applications in place (both static and dynamic automated analysis of apps for malware, vs. just a human eyeballing it).

And yet, with all that wonderful "automated" malware checking Google is also now manually reviewing App. http://blog.lifars.com/2015/03/18/google-now-manually-review...

How does the addition of manual checks against the distribution policies change the fact that Google's malware checking is better than Apple's?

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#258

Post by hrjet » Sun, May 24, 2015, 4:30 PM UTC

the8472 wrote: post #220

mQu wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. In my tests with live traffic (fingerprint,ip) tuple was as good as standard tracking cookie. Sometimes even better because I could match "incognito" modes as well. This was however only for desktop browsers. Mobile has much higher conformity and yielded mostly false positives. YMMV of course but for my purposes it was not worth it.

I imagine ipv6 would drastically reduce the chance of false positives for collisions.

Yes and No. The client could hop over a bunch of ip6-addresses, since there would be an abundance of them.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#259

Post by Nursie » Sun, May 24, 2015, 4:33 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #219

Nursie wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry, "we need analytics therefore it's fine to violate privacy" is not good reasoning!

But Mozilla doesn't appear to have done that. "We need analytics, and we respect privacy, so we've come up with something that's better than most companies but still not good enough for some of our users". It's easy to bash someone for hypocrisy when they're trying trying to do the right thing. It's a bit weird seeing this consternation at Mozilla considering just how scummy the other companies are.

They are definitely helping, but I do wish there was wider awareness of the implications of G-A everywhere.

Re: Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%

#260

Post by roryokane » Sun, May 24, 2015, 4:52 PM UTC

rufugee wrote: post #235

tenfingers wrote: post #229

This is no news to anybody that ever tried an ad blocker, a proxy/content filter or even a generic hosts file. The difference is very noticeable. In fact, it's the main reason I run such filters. The difference is not only in traffic saved/lower latency, but also much lower cpu usage. However, this it would be a bit hypocritical for Mozilla (and probably the reason why the filter is off by default). Firefox is not mu…

Can you elaborate further on the various ways Firefox phones home? I'd like to take steps on my machine to disable if possible. Thanks.

I don’t have Firefox open now, but I remember there are three such options in Preferences > Advanced > the second tab from the left. I think two of them are checked by default – they involve sending anonymous usage information. You can uncheck the checkboxes to disable them.

On the second launch after a new install or new profile creation, Firefox shows a notification bar about these settings with a button to quickly change them. I don’t remember how long ago those settings were added, nor whether they showed the notification bar for those updates.