Make Firefox Private Again

https://support.mozilla.org/no/kb/privacy-preserving-attribu... explains what the setting is about, the important bit being:

  > 3. Firefox creates a report based on what the website asks, but
  > does not give the result to the website. Instead, Firefox encrypts
  > the report and anonymously submits it using the Distributed
  > Aggregation Protocol (DAP) to an “aggregation service”.

  > 4. Your results are combined with many similar reports by the
  > aggregation service. The destination website periodically receives
  > a summary of the reports. The summary includes noise that provides
  > differential privacy.

The above docs also tell you how to turn it off with mouse clicks in regular settings (I don't understand why OP proposes to set it using the command line, perhaps so they can run it as a cronjob in case it gets reset? ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

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The intention of the project seems to be that the surveillance economy should switch over to this less invasive method of tracking you, and that perhaps if only Everyone did that then they would stop doing the worse tracking. Good intentions, but I'm guessing the only real effect it will have is to make some people stop using Firefox, most people not even notice it's there, and trackers will just use this as yet another input among their many other inputs. (OTOH, maybe Mozilla gets paid a lot for this aggregated data, I guess that's "good".)

Author mentions this: https://web.archive.org/web/20181120211720/https://make-linu...

pti=off spectre_v2=off l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier

Looks like a set of kernel params that turn off security features to speed up the OS. Did anyone test it in practice?

Just set mitigations=off if you want this, it's a meta-parameter that enables all the others. I used to run it on old hardware (Haswell) because of significant impact of all those mitigations on IO performance. It's not a problem anymore on my newer Zen 4.

Probably a bad idea in the general case if you work with anything remotely private (ssh keys, banking) and browse the internet routinely. I visit few weird sites and block JS almost everywhere, so it both made sense to me and was relatively safe.

So? Epiphany is based on WebKit now, KDE Browser doesn't exist anymore. (I needed to check it first.)

That offer to refresh always seemed a bit strange to me.

It's like Microsoft acknowledging the crust in the registry and offering their own CCleaner. A lot of activity, dubious work actually being done.

Perhaps the effect of profile lifecycles should be addressed if some hand-wavy refresh process may be required and instituted by the application.

Said another way, that's a concern for the program. Not me. This shouldn't amount to wiping the profile/extensions