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Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

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Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should at least attempt to use real statistics in your comments.

Nothing I said requires a statistic, it is common knowledge US police officers kill roughly 1000 civilians a year on average. It is also clear from investigative reporting that many police departments have a long history of colluding with local coroners to cover up many additional deaths. Colin Kaepernick didn't recently start a multimillion dollar fund to aid families of victims in getting secondary independent coro…

Real statistics that aren't limited to your own jaundiced view of reality I mean.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#422

I'm posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I've been working at Mozilla since its inception. And eventually left the company 2 years ago. And I'm so mad. Mozilla is not the Mozilla that was created almost 20 years ago. It's not the same people there. After the Firefox 4 nightmare, they started hiring product managers from big corp. We started seeing some ex-twitter, ex-microsoft, ex-amazon joining the company. Peop…

'Don't get me wrong, LGBT and such are important, but that's not the job of Mozilla.'

ESG Funds my friend, it is all about the money.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People complain about firefox doing shady stuff and then use Brave lmao. Just leaving these here: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/19125#issuecom... https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/16611#issuecom...

>High CPU usage I have that problem all the time in Firefox But probably I just opened too many tabs

I'd suggest the Auto Tab Discard extension. It's wonderful.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#424
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not even internal justification, it's just plainly the default for practically any web server that does logging. You would have to go out of your way to disable it.

Not logging IPs or establishing controls on it is table-stakes for anyone doing anything serious about privacy.

Yeah, it definitely is. But that doesn't automatically mean they actually did it.

"Best practices" are moot unless they're implemented, and since the default is to log these things, then something (even a blog post from them claiming it's been done) has to exist to show it's there and doing the right thing.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome is worse. Chromium is the open-source engine which is fine until someone like Google turns it into their minion.

You make it sound like Google took Chromium and created Chrome out of it. It's the other way round.

The two are separate things. Chrome is built on top of the chromium base. I guess technically chromium and chrome v1 were developed and released about the same time so chicken and egg thing.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing I said requires a statistic, it is common knowledge US police officers kill roughly 1000 civilians a year on average. It is also clear from investigative reporting that many police departments have a long history of colluding with local coroners to cover up many additional deaths. Colin Kaepernick didn't recently start a multimillion dollar fund to aid families of victims in getting secondary independent coro…

Real statistics that aren't limited to your own jaundiced view of reality I mean.

I haven't seen reliable polling data proving the parent's or my claim. Either of us could be right.

Although, we also haven't seen tens of millions of people protest/petition to defund or reform intelligence services recently.

Without definite data, the fact that we've seen that urgency around local police reform seems like a decent alternate public sentiment indicator.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#427
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has fixed a lot of issues in their Quantum release. It removed a lot of what you called bloat as well. In tests it uses a lot less memory on average compared to Chrome. The privacy settings have been extended even further in recent years. Chrome’s settings come not even close to it. The extension system is still more flexible than Chrome’s. It has some built-in features such as autoplay stop and audio control…

Sure, you go ahead and believe that. Every release of Firefox I've tried, including the recent ones, have sucked and been full of spam. I'm angry at them because how the hell did we get here from the beauty of early Firefox and Phoenix? They've become the monster they were trying to fight. You don't agree with my assertions, that's fine. Its marketshare speaks for itself. People don't trust Mozilla anymore, with good…

I'm old enough to remember the news of a "young kid" taking on Mozilla, IE and Netscape with their super lean Firefox browser, that was 20 years ago. It was meant to be lean, with the ability to install additional optional functionality through Plugins.

Now Firefox is old and bloated (Pocket?). It never got to be "lean" (always struggling with memory leaks, bad performance, etc) and poor compatibility (not Firefox fault, but still Firefox problem).

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#428
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how GDPR works. This isn't gathering personal data, PII or anything similar so wouldn't fall under the scope of GDPR.

IP address can be PII. What are they hooking the download tracking code to if not IPs? If you sign up for a Mozilla account, providing PII, are you saying they then throw away the link between the install and original download?

They don't need to hook an IP to a tracking code for this sort of testing?

From what they've said it's very basic information they're looking to collect. "This installer was downloaded on X date. The installer was then used and run on X date." sort of thing.

No IP is needed to check anything regarding that.

Attaching an IP in the process somewhere for tracking would only be needed if you were checking things on a deeper level. For example, where a user might download the installer but is downloading and sending it to someone else, where it gets installed on a different IP/system.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally feel like it's not treating user's privacy as "fundamental" to increasingly add telemetry like this. In this case correlating downloads to system installs, and to have that on by default. It's fairly hidden first off (what % of users are going to watch the checksums or read these articles?). You also don't seem to get a chance to opt-out of this until after the installation when you can open settings in…

I believe you can opt out by having your browser send the Do No Track (DNT) header when you download Firefox. This applies to all analytics on Mozilla.org. https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/blob/a8ed6ae9c48c93474fbe...

Thanks for the info.

Re: Each Firefox download has a unique identifier

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the lynx-but-graphical alternative? Dillo or elinks > I just want a minimal web view and input a URL. Surf (suckless project)

Also thanks, TIL alternatives do exist

Elinks looks like it hasn't had an update in years. There's a fork of it called Felinks [0] which seems pretty actively maintained. The last release was on December 24, 2021.

[0] https://github.com/rkd77/elinks

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