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Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

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Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#261

Post by _8j50 »

Liquid_Fire wrote: post #145
_8j50 wrote: 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…

Perhaps the specific websites you are using are particularly bad on Firefox (whether due to issues with the website or Firefox), but I do not share your experience at all. For me Firefox is fast and I never see it using too much memory, much less bringing the whole system to a halt. So my suggestion is to file bugs for any websites that perform particularly badly for you.

Specific? Yes ,but it's a ton of sites. The site devs basically give up on firefox.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#262

Post by _8j50 »

justinph wrote: post #162
_8j50 wrote: 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.

Maybe it is a windows thing, when browing sites on non-work/non-productivity sites on Linux I have no issues but then again that's a different set of tasks

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#263

Post by Angostura »

ecmascript wrote: post #151
Angostura wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see your worked examples of why having brand values based around inclusivity has lead to a drop in market share. Do you have any evidence for that? Or are you assuming that Brendan’s superior execution skills would have avoided it?

It's easy, people don't like getting politics shoved in their faces when they're using some product that has nothing to do with poltiics. Especially when they disagree with the message. Of course, in the Mozilla case it's more than their pander to wokeness that made them become unrelevant. It's their focus on shitty products that no one asked for or wanted. For example, Pocket. Such a waste of money, I'm sure they ha…

> It's easy, people don't like getting politics shoved in their faces when they're using some product

How many people using Firefox do you think have even heard of Brendan? Not many, I'd wager. The community who contribute? robably significantly more.

I love this bit: "I'm sure Brendan wouldn't have spent millions on shit products and woke politics"

How much did they spend on 'woke politics'?

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#264

Post by catalogia »

codehalo wrote: post #226
catalogia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want no part of Brave's weird cryptoish scheme. I know the feature is opt-in, but I don't see the point in supporting an organization unable to find a source of revenue I find agreeable. Even something as simple and obnoxious as donation nagging, like Wikipedia, seems preferable to what Brave has proposed.

Do you have a problem with Mozilla's revenue from Google?

Obviously.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#265

Post by fabrice_d »

alecmg wrote: post #69
ilitirit wrote: post #10

> Mozilla lost the browser wars Honest question... who did they lose to? Google Chrome? For me personally, Firefox has been better than Chrome for several years now. The only reason I still load up Chrome is when I want to stream to my Chromecast.

Came here to react on first words in article too. Netscape lost. Original Opera lost. IE lost. Edge lost. As in killed off by creators and no new work is done on it. Mozilla Firefox at this point is going strong and growing. It is a better browser than Chrome for me.

Unfortunately it's not growing: look at Mozilla's own usage data at https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#266

Post by [deleted] »

luckylion wrote: post #147
dangus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m failing to see how Mozilla is being political, and how fighting hate is political. Theoretically, people across the political spectrum should all agree with that. Hate online is a huge problem, and if Mozilla think they have potential to solve that problem, I’d say they can go for it. It’s their budget, not mine or yours.

> Hate online is a huge problem, and if Mozilla think they have potential to solve that problem, I’d say they can go for it. So is climate change. They really should focus on that problem, because it's literally endangering our planet, not just the Internet. Or they should keep their focus on a more narrow topic that they actually understand and have some success in working on. I've yet to see mission creep that didn…

[deleted]

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#267

Post by throwaway2048 »

tialaramex wrote: post #179
heartbeats wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not very anonymized. Google already has a list of URLs, so they can just hash them all and see what matches. And if they have URL 1, 2, and 4, odds are they can interpolate to find out what #3 is.

> so they can just hash them all and see what matches Matches _what_ ? Firefox doesn't send hashes to Google Safe Browsing. This would not only be a privacy problem it would also make the browser much too slow. Instead Firefox periodically downloads a summary of what might be unsafe, and then it compares hashes to that summary. If there's a match in the summary (rare but it happens) it fetches more detailed parts of…

It does however request hash prefixes, then google sends to the client all bad URLs that match, that is what can be brute forced with relative ease, if you already have a stream of previous they are visiting (via google analytics, google captcha, and other matched hashes). Especially if you know most every URL on the internet already. (hash them, then look it up in a table).

Anonymization is a very tricky subject, and there is a lot of techniques that get trumpeted but are absolutely not effective assuming a bad faith actor.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#268

Post by ASalazarMX »

tssva wrote: post #241
ASalazarMX wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know if it is so now. When the feature was introduced, Chrome synced with my account automatically when I logged in to one of its services. I found it so bold I've never used any Google service inside chrome again.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#269

Post by tialaramex »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #267
tialaramex wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so they can just hash them all and see what matches Matches _what_ ? Firefox doesn't send hashes to Google Safe Browsing. This would not only be a privacy problem it would also make the browser much too slow. Instead Firefox periodically downloads a summary of what might be unsafe, and then it compares hashes to that summary. If there's a match in the summary (rare but it happens) it fetches more detailed parts of…

It does however request hash prefixes, then google sends to the client all bad URLs that match, that is what can be brute forced with relative ease, if you already have a stream of previous they are visiting (via google analytics, google captcha, and other matched hashes). Especially if you know most every URL on the internet already. (hash them, then look it up in a table). Anonymization is a very tricky subject, an…

> It does however request hash prefixes, then google sends to the client all bad URLs that match

IF the prefix is a match, which is relatively unusual then the browser requests the full list for that prefix. But also, no, Google just sends back a list of full hashes and not URLs.

> that is what can be brute forced with relative ease

OK. 1f6866 is a hash prefix, quick "brute force" it with this supposed relative ease, what am I looking at?

How about 0aebaf? Ah, trick question, that's just noise stirred in automatically by Firefox (yes their implementation silently does this, typically the noise drowns out signal by a ratio of 4:1 but it's configurable).

Or wait, maybe the first one was noise and this isn't. Google neither knows nor cares.

Still, you'll just use "relative ease" to brute force every 24-bit number and then er, more brute force to figure out which ones are bogus. You can do the same with my phone number. One of the digits is a "five" - quick, brute force the whole number and tell me what it is to show how great "brute force" is at hand-waving impossible problems!

> if you already have a stream of previous they are visiting

I know this trick. Hey, pick a number, then add two to that number, then take away the number you first thought of. The number you're now thinking of is two - tada!

Yes, if I know where you are then I can "magically" tell where you are using seemingly unrelated information, by simply discarding it and already knowing where you are.

But this "technique" works perfectly well without Safe Browsing and so it has no bearing on whether Safe Browsing is in fact safe.

> Anonymization is a very tricky subject

Brain surgery is also a tricky subject. But Google's Safe Browsing project doesn't do Brain surgery either.

Re: Mozilla’s plan to fix internet privacy

#270

Post by zaarn »

cobalt60 wrote: post #164
walrus01 wrote: post #60

Firefox on Android has become my go to choice now, because it supports the full set of desktop firefox plugins, including the essential ublock origin. I can't even imagine mobile browsing without full adblock functionality anymore.

AdguardHome/PiHole on DoT/DoH? Android 9+ supports private DNS.

DNS blockers don't block all ads, uBlock on top is very effective.
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