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Make Firefox Private Again

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Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#341

Post by willywanker »

luuurker wrote: post #132
willywanker wrote: post #38

Or use Pale Moon, forked long ago and developed independently, that respects your privacy out of the box without needing 50 different 'hardening' Arkenfox type changes or having to keep watch every time Mozilla tries to screw over end users like this. Zero telemetry, zero advertising and no mental gymnastics over how we're financially dependent on Google but still value your privacy. And bonus, it retains XUL extensi…

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Pale Moon" is their toxic developers. But let's ignore that... Is it safe to use Pale Moon as your main browser? How many security patches is it missing from upstream Firefox? Do they have any security team? I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality,…

The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community. Pale Moon isn't a rebuild of Firefox - it's a complete fork with its own rendering engine Goanna based off Gecko 52 and developed independently. Several of the security vulnerabilities introduced due to the larger code base and complexity of a multi process browser (to say nothing of Firefox's additional bloat of adding what are better as extensions to the browser core such as a PDF renderer or Pocket) are simply not applicable to Pale Moon, but the release notes detail the ones that are and have been patched.

The only thing 'outdated' is their not jumping on the minimalist, mobile focused UI that Chrome invented and Firefox copied and retaining a sane, desktop user focused and fully customizable UI that doesn't need digging into about:config or userChrome.css tweaks and can be directly done from the preferences dialog or context menus. The way Firefox used to be until version 4 onwards when the copying Chrome and limiting user choice began. To your last point, why should you have to tweak Firefox for privacy at all when they keep proclaiming how privacy friendly they supposedly are? Pale Moon is private out of the box - there is no baked in telemetry (they don't run a telemetry server, for starters), analytics, tracking, advertising or anything else on those lines.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#342

Post by willywanker »

efilife wrote: post #70
willywanker wrote: post #38

Or use Pale Moon, forked long ago and developed independently, that respects your privacy out of the box without needing 50 different 'hardening' Arkenfox type changes or having to keep watch every time Mozilla tries to screw over end users like this. Zero telemetry, zero advertising and no mental gymnastics over how we're financially dependent on Google but still value your privacy. And bonus, it retains XUL extensi…

https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/palemoon This article is 5 years old and I'm not sure whether it's accurate anymore, but might be worth checking to be sure we are completely private. I also remember some drama about pale moon's author despising TOR and not wanting uBlock to work

The author of this is has some pretty ridiculous allegations, from blaming the browser for analytics on its homepage provider (when you can directly change the homepage to whatever you want right from the preferences without digging into about:config or elsewhere) to automatic updates, which is set to notify about them by default, not download and apply them. Firefox was(is?) known to install a separate updater service on Windows, FFS.

And he's complaining about NoScript, which doesn't play well with Pale Moon to the extent of destabilizing the browser and whose Pale Moon compatible XUL version is long abandoned by its developer while there's an alternative (eMatrix, forked from now abandoned uMatrix that was made by uBlock Origin's author) available. (https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=17619)

Pale Moon is what Firefox used to be once upon a time in terms of customization and privacy before Mozilla became Google's controlled opposition to guard against browser monopoly allegations.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#343

Post by [deleted] »

michael9423 wrote: post #245
eitland wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have used it as my secondary browser (~everything that doesn't need login: documentation, news, etc) for a couple of years now and it is great. Also always looking for someone to create a paid version of Firefox that: - stays up to date with development of FF - turns off all the stupid ideas - gradually re-implement the most important parts that certain old extensions dependend on: scrapbook, scheduled website update…

Librewolf does #1 and #2 already. But generally, there's no market for that. Most of those who say "I would pay for that" would indeed never do it. Because those people want something very specific - something you can only have via extensions and personal modifications. What you want is very specific to what you personally want and it is different to what everyone else wants. And no one can create a browser project f…

[deleted]

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#344

Post by authorfly »

Vinnl wrote: post #288
ghostly_s wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And unsurprisingly, he just lies. Here's the crux of the bullshit: "It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting." No new technology is needed for measuring impressions and conversions. Your ad server can count impressions, and a simple referrer URL can track conversions. An Apache 1.0 server could handle this 30 years ago. What the advertisers want is all sorts of ot…

Disclaimer: I didn't work on this and I'm not an expert on the topic, but... As I understand it, it's not so much measuring how often a particular ad was seen, but how often the people who converted have seen a particular ad before , without anything about the people who did. Conceptually, it's similar to cutting out a coupon from a newspaper to get a discount; the store then knows that that newspaper ad led to the s…

It's not similar to cutting out a coupon. It's placing a token with a permanent bluetooth tracker on every person that happens to use the nearby convenience store (firefox) without their knowing and having your staff pick up the tokens of those that walk into the paint shop with bluetooth connections.

The coupon analogy falls down anyway - Coupons are loss-leaders designed to impact and increase future spending trends usually, and typically provide a discount others cannot access, or a discount upon a known previous price point - in other words some type of (possibly spurious) discount.

Nobody leaves without a tracker, the description is vague and the direction of travel for purchasing becomes more Ad-laden. Company conversion and profit rates going up means the consumers are paying more than the otherwise would, either in price (profit) or volume. Can't you see how this can only be worse and is nothing like a coupon?

Advertising is not a net 0, people who see more advertising spend more of their money. This is correlated with quality of life and happiness negatively. Furthermore, if you have libertarian tendencies, advertising makes unknown companies like startups less appealing to consumers due to primal branding psychology, and stops them challenging incumbents. It's a net negative. It's worse for the consumers.

What's the primal reason you are contributing to this thread? To defend someone and their policy - or to avoid some other fear?

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#345

Post by luuurker »

willywanker wrote: post #341
luuurker wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first thing that comes to mind when I hear "Pale Moon" is their toxic developers. But let's ignore that... Is it safe to use Pale Moon as your main browser? How many security patches is it missing from upstream Firefox? Do they have any security team? I don't mind using outdated software for a specific task, but I feel uncomfortable after a certain point. Unless you absolutely need the old XUL-era functionality,…

The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community. Pale Moon isn't a rebuild of Firefox - it's a complete fork with its own rendering engine Goanna based off Gecko 52 and developed independently. Several of the security vulnerabilities introduced due to the larger code base and complexity of a multi process browser (to say nothing of Firefox's additional bloat of adding wha…

> The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community.

It wasn't just "Matt A. Tobin". For example, "Moonchild" was involved in that OpenBSD debacle ( https://archive.is/qbpmL ). Just someone trying to make Pale Moon to work and they approached it like that. Moonchild still blames OpenBSD devs for it... earlier this year he said they were "uncooperative" ( https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=30732 )... I wonder why.

A few were fine with Tobin's behaviour and happy to support him... and they're still there.

This doesn't affect the performance or security of the browser, but it's something that bothers me and so it's a point against when considering which browser should I use.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#346

Post by Vinnl »

authorfly wrote: post #344
Vinnl wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: I didn't work on this and I'm not an expert on the topic, but... As I understand it, it's not so much measuring how often a particular ad was seen, but how often the people who converted have seen a particular ad before , without anything about the people who did. Conceptually, it's similar to cutting out a coupon from a newspaper to get a discount; the store then knows that that newspaper ad led to the s…

It's not similar to cutting out a coupon. It's placing a token with a permanent bluetooth tracker on every person that happens to use the nearby convenience store (firefox) without their knowing and having your staff pick up the tokens of those that walk into the paint shop with bluetooth connections. The coupon analogy falls down anyway - Coupons are loss-leaders designed to impact and increase future spending trend…

My reason for contributing was that I think there's a misunderstanding if someone thinks it's targeting rather than measurement, which the comment I replied to stated.

There's a separate discussion to be had about whether advertising in general is a good or bad thing, whether Mozilla should be actively fighting it, and if that would even be viable, but I'm not too interested in that at the moment.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#347

Post by willywanker »

luuurker wrote: post #345
willywanker wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community. Pale Moon isn't a rebuild of Firefox - it's a complete fork with its own rendering engine Goanna based off Gecko 52 and developed independently. Several of the security vulnerabilities introduced due to the larger code base and complexity of a multi process browser (to say nothing of Firefox's additional bloat of adding wha…

> The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community. It wasn't just "Matt A. Tobin". For example, "Moonchild" was involved in that OpenBSD debacle ( https://archive.is/qbpmL ). Just someone trying to make Pale Moon to work and they approached it like that. Moonchild still blames OpenBSD devs for it... earlier this year he said they were "uncooperative" ( https://forum.palem…

The OpenBSD issue was pretty clear - building against system libraries alters the browser configuration and behavior, for which Moonchild would end up being held responsible. Even now there are contributed 3rd party builds on the downloads page for Mac OS and OpenSolaris among others, these are vetted to follow the build procedure and are authorized to use the official branding as a result. OpenBSD can make their own build if they want but they can't call it Pale Moon. Hyperbola Linux does exactly that - their Iceweasel and IceApe browser/suite are built on Pale Moon's Unified XUL Platform (which is forked from the old Mozilla application platform) but are clearly seen as separate products.

There is already a similar issue with forks for Windows XP called New Moon and My Pal - Pale Moon long since dropped support for XP yet users of these builds show up on the forum asking for help instead of asking the fork maintainers.

Re: Make Firefox Private Again

#348

Post by luuurker »

willywanker wrote: post #347
luuurker wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The toxic developer in question quit 2 years ago - things are peaceful now with the community. It wasn't just "Matt A. Tobin". For example, "Moonchild" was involved in that OpenBSD debacle ( https://archive.is/qbpmL ). Just someone trying to make Pale Moon to work and they approached it like that. Moonchild still blames OpenBSD devs for it... earlier this year he said they were "uncooperative" ( https://forum.palem…

The OpenBSD issue was pretty clear - building against system libraries alters the browser configuration and behavior, for which Moonchild would end up being held responsible. Even now there are contributed 3rd party builds on the downloads page for Mac OS and OpenSolaris among others, these are vetted to follow the build procedure and are authorized to use the official branding as a result. OpenBSD can make their own…

The only point that the OpenBSD situation made clear to me was that both Pale Moon developers are good with code, but terrible at basic human interaction.

The maintainer was still in the phase of trying to make it work, the code was on a personal github... there was no Pale Moon for OpenBSD, no decision on actually making it available, let alone forking it or giving it another name... it never got to that point. And that's why approaching the issue with that style made no sense. "You will revise your mozconfig..."? The average person will tell you to take a hike. "I will not be as educational next time."? Would you continue working (for free!) on making someone else's "product" when they make a threat the first time they interact with you?

What's wrong with a "Hey, thanks for working on this, however since you're not using our libraries and , you'd need to rename the browser as per our license and we also don't want to be associated with ports that do this. Let me know if we can help with anything."

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to be associated with something that might not work as you intend it to, not want to support it, etc, but you can't behave like an asshole if you want people to work with you. Like, you're being more hostile than someone like Mozilla would usually be under similar conditions... no wonder the attempted port died with that Github issue.

In any case, and going back to my point about them being toxic, Moonchild was fine with Tobin's behaviour (and vice-versa) towards others and even joined in sometimes... so only blaming Tobin makes no sense. Moonchild still doesn't see anything wrong with the way they approached the My Pal and OpenBSD situations, so it's only a matter of time until the next drama. Essentially, it might be a less toxic project now, but some of the people who made it toxic are still there and have not changed their ways. That's their right, I guess, but it's not something I want to be associated with.

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