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Facebook Container for Firefox

mozilla.org

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Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#321

Post by megous »

I tried containers for a while, but I didn't really trust the separation, and I also wanted the browser to be separated from my regular homedir/user.

So now I have a script to create/remove new UNIX users with a pre-configured firefox profile and a script to run the firefox under that user.

It has some quirks, but also some benefits. Mainly that the browser doesn't have access to all files on my computer, and the separation between profiles is enforced by the OS, which I trust more.

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#322

Post by sumedh »

Mandatum wrote: post #203
pkulak wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow. I used containers for a while, but the official plugin for managing them was awful. You had to go to the site, set the container, then click an approve button the _next_ time you went to it. Took forever to get things set up, and it never synced the settings despite claiming it would. I'm going to give this one a try. Thanks!

> but the official plugin for managing them was awful I wish we'd stop being so hard on products. It's likely those developers read these comments. Having babies be called ugly by your peers is rough, actively trying to be more respectful on the internet leads to a nicer industry. EDIT: Just to clarify - I'm not saying your intention was disrespectful. I've written many comments similar to this, and continue to do so…

They should not take it personally. The UX/dev people at Firefox should take that as a constructive criticism.

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#323

Post by girder »

axismundi wrote: post #249

How bizarre that I desperately try to contain these monsters in digital cages, keeping them on a VPN leash, carefully adding plugins, trying to maintain delicate balance. Sometimes I try too hard, the monsters are offended, throw errors, hide the contents away. Sometimes I miss something, and they devour my privacy bit by bit, unnoticed. I spend sleepless nights scouring the internet for new codes, secret browser opt…

Beautiful

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#324

Post by wejick »

acolumb wrote: post #299
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The time to switch back to Firefox was years ago. But better late than never.

The only asterisk to that statement would be if OP was a Mac user. Using Firefox for reddit and youtube nets me 4 hours of battery life on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro, while safari will get my 6.5-8 hours with the same usage.

It's because mac doesn't support vp8 hardware decoding. use this extension to force youtube to use h264 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/

Blame apple

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#325

Post by laksdjfkasljdf »

wejick wrote: post #324
acolumb wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only asterisk to that statement would be if OP was a Mac user. Using Firefox for reddit and youtube nets me 4 hours of battery life on a 2020 13 inch MacBook Pro, while safari will get my 6.5-8 hours with the same usage.

It's because mac doesn't support vp8 hardware decoding. use this extension to force youtube to use h264 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/h264ify/ Blame apple

> Blame apple

and Google, for not doing the minimum thing they could have done and served you the best encoding for the platform.

It is almost if the companies you actually give you money to (or eyeballs) do not care at all for your interests.

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#327

Post by laksdjfkasljdf »

welfare wrote: post #126
jmnicolas wrote: post #118

Browser finger printing will defeat this. I wonder how prevalent it is. Most of the sites I visit seem not to recognize me without cookies but I always wonder if it's just a "ploy" to make me feel untracked. While I'm at it, anyone has good resources on how not to be finger printed (without going full Tor browser)? Do I have to disable Javascript?

Hi, I did my thesis on browser fingerprinting. Most algorithms that build profiles and look for combinations of features that are unique. The best way to hide your fingerprint is to be as similar to everyone as possible. So that means use as much of the standards as possible that comes with the OS. Do not use anything that would not be considered mainstream (e.g. don't be the only person from Guatemala on Opera, Linu…

How did you validate this research? It is not like companies that do profiling do that in the open, in verifiable manner.

Also, weird you mention dvorak. I know this is just a hyperbole for the joke of being an easy to identify linux hacker... but keymap is the one thing you can't use for fingerprinting... well, you are able to use the language (by detecting typed in keycodes and matching against a mimum denominator of keymaps) but not the keymap itself (e.g. no way to see qwerty-US vs dvorak-US, but easy to detect -US vs -DE for example)

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#328

Post by debaserab2 »

autoexec wrote: post #302
welfare wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rate of change is of course an important factor, but some things like the order of how you installed fonts (which depends on the order you installed the software that fonts came with) or the plugins you have installed in your browser are still going to be constant. What we saw was that people tried to spoof their UA only made it more unique. (E.g. your UA says Internet Explorer but you have Chrome specific plugin…

As long as you're spoofing your fingerprint info (you can randomly change things like fonts, video cards, battery life, plugins etc) it doesn't matter how unique you are because every time you visit the site you'll be unique just like everyone else who is either a first time visitor or does the same. That seems way more effective than trying to hide in a "crowd" when even the smallest consistent deviation in an ever…

Couldn't the frequency of profile information itself be considered a uniquely identifying attribute? Couple that with something that's harder to change on every request (such as IP address) and I imagine you can confidently build a profile out of that.

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#329

Post by Tagbert »

Macha wrote: post #61
datfrojo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What advantages does brave have other than their weird ad replacement thing? I’ve weirdly moved to Microsoft edge from Firefox for something’s recently. Unfortunately the chrome developer tools are awful.

Chromium browser which still generally has a performance edge, but without some types of Google's tracking like the browser level sign in or the recent example of Google exempting themselves from clear cookies.

But is that performance difference actually important? I can accept a minor impact as a tradeoff to support a more diverse ecosystem and weaken the Google monolith just a little.

Re: Facebook Container for Firefox

#330

Post by tialaramex »

neogodless wrote: post #314
tialaramex wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Facebook Container extension is special, it does a bunch of work to put all of Facebook and only Facebook inside the Facebook Container. Bits of Facebook trying to peak through outside Facebook (e.g. tracking pixels) are elided entirely. Which is exactly what I want. But ordinarily that's not the behaviour you get from a Firefox container. e.g. I have that Facebook Container, and I also have a Slack container I j…

Ok so my point is that you specifically don't put any Google sites into "a" container but rather let them fall where there are, and if you have a Work container and open something Google, you only ever log into the Work-related Google account?

For work stuff my habit for maybe a decade or more has been to have work buy me hardware and the work hardware does work stuff, so this conflict never arises. The closest is maybe a previous employer paid me a retainer and obviously they didn't buy me a special laptop just for like one conference call a year on retainer, so I did that from my PC.

But yes, in a Foo container, all the various Google things (Docs, GMail, their Cloud offering, Youtube...) are either not logged in at all or they're logged in from some Foo context.

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