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

Firefox 69.0 Released

mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 331 posts

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#291

Post by bscphil »

Aardwolf wrote: post #54

> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound. Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it! Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throat…

> I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it!

Twitch does this, which is very annoying, because (on Firefox for Android) I have to unmute the video every time. As far as I know there's no way to allow audio to autoplay on a specific site on FfA.

Hopefully this moves web developers in the direction of either requesting autoplay permission (if they need it) or not autoplaying at all.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#292

Post by bscphil »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #277
Aardwolf wrote: post #54

> The Block Autoplay feature is enhanced to give users the option to block any video that automatically starts playing, not just those that automatically play with sound. Good. I know a news website that was on purpose disabling sound on videos to prevent that. So not only does it autoplay, you need to click to unmute anyway to actually hear it! Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throat…

There's about a thousand cynical answers to your question, but the truth is simply that not everyone is like your (or me): all measures (return visits, pages/visit, conversions, etc) just happen to be better for autoplaying video. I would totally agree with you and the others that it's an annoying practice. Yet then again when I blanket-banned autoplay, I was annoyed by youtube videos no longer doing it. Turns out we…

We like it on pages where the only reason to go to the page is to view the video. In these cases, autoplay saves time. And they're clearly distinct from cases where someone might go to a page for reasons other than viewing that video. (Examples: a news site with a text story, Youtube's channel pages)

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#293

Post by shostack »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #145
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #99

Can someone clarify for me what "Enhanced Tracking Protection" covers? The text on Mozilla's pages is a bit fluff, I'm interested in the mechanics of it. I've been out of ad-tech for about 5 years, but when I was working in that industry it was common to drop evil cookie pixels everywhere in the page and then do cookie-matching with them ("my cookie for this user is X, do we per-chance have a match with something you…

Typically, the way these things work is that third party cookies are set with short lifetimes and first party cookies are set with long lifetimes. In other words, this doesn't prevent Facebook from tracking you with its Like buttons if you visit facebook.com as well, but it does prevent the DSPs and data brokers who don't have first party destination sites from tracking you across their clients. Ultimately, this will…

To add, big players have been moving to server side tracking for some time now. Cookies are fragile.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#294

Post by DenseComet »

autoexec wrote: post #253
_coveredInBees wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing you can turn it off? If you're not paying Mozilla for their browser, it seems weird to me to bitch and complain about ways Mozilla explores to generate some revenue without selling out their user's privacy. Especially when they make it very easy to opt out of the thing you don't like. Comments like yours are what makes me very nervous about the future for Mozilla. They are still entirely at the mercy of Go…

> "without selling out their user's privacy" This is the key. I think sending any unsolicited traffic to 3rd party websites counts as violating my privacy. Pocket goes far beyond that. Pocket Recommendations are personalized based on your browsing behavior in Firefox. It doesn't matter that Mozilla and Pocket don't see your browsing history directly. While the choice of which links to push at you are made client side…

Whats really interesting to me is that this seems to be more of a huge marketing issue. Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this. Now, obviously, Mozilla does need to improve the sponsored stories and not track the user without input, but at the same time, its not a 3rd party in the general stance.

* https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-po...

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#295

Post by autoexec »

DenseComet wrote: post #294
autoexec wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "without selling out their user's privacy" This is the key. I think sending any unsolicited traffic to 3rd party websites counts as violating my privacy. Pocket goes far beyond that. Pocket Recommendations are personalized based on your browsing behavior in Firefox. It doesn't matter that Mozilla and Pocket don't see your browsing history directly. While the choice of which links to push at you are made client side…

Whats really interesting to me is that this seems to be more of a huge marketing issue. Pocket IS Mozilla* and it seems like people would be more ok with the integration if they knew this. Now, obviously, Mozilla does need to improve the sponsored stories and not track the user without input, but at the same time, its not a 3rd party in the general stance. * https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/02/27/mozilla-acquires-p…

Good info! I had no idea it was a subsidiary of Mozilla. I was even at pockets website and I didn't see any obvious indication.

That still leaves them on the hook for sending your data to companies like DoubleClick. I hope it also means the data the pocket guys are collecting will fall under Mozilla's policies because I've been trusting them so far not to sell my data to anyone willing to pay for it, while generally I wouldn't put that kind of faith in a targeted adverting company.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#296

Post by zerocrates »

aswan wrote: post #256
zerocrates wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My unscientific feeling as an outside observer is that there's a pretty common pattern in the browsers of making a feature harder to access, leading to less use of the feature, and then removing the feature when the telemetry data shows there are few users. I don't know if it's a purposeful process or not, but I'd say it's perfectly reasonable for users to think that pref-gating is the first step toward removal. The…

There's a very good point here about the limits of using usage telemetry -- given a question of the form "should we invest in improving feature X?", it's a mistake to decide not to simply on the basis of low usage. Low usage could be because users simply aren't interested in the feature (in which case it probably doesn't make sense to invest in improving it), or it could be that they really are interested in it but t…

I also think this is a pretty reasonable change, since it already requires users to edit files, so about:config is not really a major additional step.

But I also would imagine the usage was quite low already and any incremental hassle will push it lower and it won't be hard to get to an analysis where maintaining a rarely-used non-default codepath is seen as not worth it. Of course it all depends on what's going on with the specific code at issue, but the basic point of my post is that "nobody is proposing to remove this capability" is true, until it isn't.

This isn't a feature I actually use, but I also find the removal of a minuscule startup delay of a program I don't actually start very often to be a pretty marginal improvement, so I don't really have skin in the game in either direction.

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#297

Post by [deleted] »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #214
acdha wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do news websites want to shove autoplaying videos on people's throats so much, what's wrong with playing at any time when you want? There was a bubble awhile back when advertisers were being told that video had better metrics, and all of the news sites jumped on higher-paying ads. That seems to have tapered off as advertisers noticed poor returns and learned that Facebook had been massively misrepresenting the…

We may never be free of it; it's gone on long enough that there's a whole generation that's grown up thinking it's normal to get information by watching a five minute video that conveys the same information as five lines of text.

[deleted]

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#298

Post by slater »

asadotzler wrote: post #242
jahlove wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or at least make it an extension. But they know people would uninstall it if they were given the option.

People are given the option to disable it in Options/Preferences and most of them don't. What makes you think implementing it as an extension with a similar disable capability just in the Add-ons Manager instead of Options/Preferences would be any different?

What's preventing Mozilla from shipping it as an extension?

Re: Firefox 69.0 Released

#299

Post by nyolfen »

sellingwebsite wrote: post #230
gnud wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _really_ bugs me that pocket isn't packaged as a pre-installed extension, that you can uninstall normally.

But you can disable it quite easily: about:config -> extensions.pocket.enabled: false

i would find it very surprising if more than 2 or 3% of firefox users have ever used about:config at all
Post reply on HN