In a world where so much of our lives depend on the use of online services, the web browser used to access those services becomes of crucial importance. It becomes a question of whether we trust the huge corporate interests which control this software with such access to our daily lives, and it is vital that the browser world remains a playing field with many players in the game.
The mantle has traditionally fallen upon Mozilla’s Firefox browser to represent freedom from corporate ownership, but over the last couple of years even they have edged away from their open source ethos and morphed into an advertising company that happens to have a browser. We’re asking you: can we still trust Mozilla’s Firefox, when the latest version turns on ad measurement by default?
Such has been the dominance of Google’s Chromium in the browser world, that it becomes difficult to find alternatives which aren’t based on it. We can see the attraction for developers, instead of pursuing the extremely hard task of developing a new browser engine, just use one off-the-shelf upon which someone else has already done the work. As a result, once you have discounted browsers such as the venerable Netsurf or Dillo which are cool as heck but relatively useless for modern websites, the choices quickly descend into the esoteric. There are Ladybird and Servo which are both promising but still too rough around the edges for everyday use, so what’s left? Probably LibreWolf represents the best option, a version of Firefox with a focus on privacy and security.
We’re interested in your views on this topic, because we know you’ll have a lot to say about it. Meanwhile if you’re a Firefox user who’s upgraded to version 128 and you’re not sure what to do, don’t panic. Find the settings page, go to “Privacy and Security”, and un-check the “Website Advertising Preferences” checkbox.
Firefox has been a bad joke on its formerly awesome self for a very long time now. They may not have entirely sold their souls to Google back in the early 2000s and just be boiling us frogs slowly so we don’t jump ship make something actually good again, but it wouldn’t look any different if they had.
I’d have said when they decided “You know all those cool tricks you’ve been doing with the browser guts that make the UI more useful? Yeah, we’re not allowing that in extensions anymore.” But you’re not wrong about the stuffing politics where they don’t belong either.
That was definitely the more overt sign and showed how they view their relationship with third party developers.
This. Happily using Pale Moon. It is not perfect, but it works for me. The DDG browser is not bad. I use it for some sites.
Having a place “where politics don’t belong” is the same as having a place where your values and morals don’t apply.
There’s no such thing. It’s just a way we convince ourselves to do evil.
If action is political, so is inaction.
Yeah, no. Only authoritarians think that way. Try thinking it out with an eye for something other than immediate gains for yourself in mind and a little less self righteousness.
No. Your thinking is an example of radicalization.
Software is software, math is math.
Yes, software is amoral. That’s a good thing.
Well said.
My browser shouldn’t have an ideology, nor does it need one. All it has to do is… nothing. It doesn’t have to align itself with any idea or movement. A browser is one of the few remaining pieces of web infrastructure that we can all agree is truly neutral (c.f. search engines). That you seemingly support the Orwellian measures proposed by Mozilla to censor the web at the browser level says far more about you than your fallcious argument (that’s the charitable version; semantic and epistemological chicanery is more fitting).
It’s open source. It can be as good as the will of it’s users make it.
Well a fork could, not the original branch. They’ve already made that abundantly clear up at Mozilla.
this is why I switched to floorp. can’t beat Firefox’s rendering engine but the the team at floorp wraps a browser around it that much more aligns with my wants than Firefox.
Not the users, the maintainers and core developers. When those loose their way it didn’t matter what the users want, three project will change direction.
Thats not true. Yes you and I can individually put together our own compiled version to our hearts content based on it. The project as a whole however is controlled by individuals with a heavy hand on the direction and featureset for the official releases. They’ve proven to be very unwilling to vary from decisions that emulate chrome and maintain their own identity.
Well with how much a ‘functional’ browser is starting to resemble an operating system in its complexity some of the changes that have happened are rather inevitable – though why a browser needs to be so complex… With the likely alternative being there are no alternatives to chrome based for a prolonged period (if ever) as actually doing the work requires funding and interested people.
So far without having looked at exactly how this feature works only having read the Mozilla overview I’d give this change a pass – adverts are important to fund the modern web and this does seem to be the best way to make adverts function well without obnoxious behaviour. Can’t say I love the idea but it does seem like an improvement on the way things are now.
Back when I started using Firefox, they coded for the HTML standards and left everything else up to the user rather than what the corporations said they needed. So I’m just never going to have that mindset, because I remember when the choices were mine rather than made “for my own good”.
That is all well and good, I can agree with the sentiment as well. But ultimately people actually want functional web browsers, and the modern website…
When the choice would be effectively no internet at all or bow before Google without Mozilla managing to survive all this time and provide an alternative the compromises they have made seem OK to me. More importantly it offers an alternative where you can still make virtually if not every choice you’d want if you care to do so – it is just shipping with defaults you may dislike, but also good documentation and so far all the changes announced publicly (at least as far as I know nobody has ever caught them sneaking something in without telling) so you don’t have to actually use it the default way, and are not being shafted without warning.
Don’t get me wrong I miss the old days too, but…
True, you’re told every time a change is made, by the changelog or the source if nothing else. We’re way, way far away from it just being changes to the defaults with you still having the option to revert to previous functionality though.
Google pays Moz a heck of a lot of money though, so almost every anti-user feature that lands in Chrome also makes its way into Firefox. The most obvious example for people who haven’t been nursing this grudge for decades and remembering all the times we’ve been hosed being the switch to Chrome’s extension packaging, with all the intentional functionality removal that comes along with the switch.
I’d rather have forked out the cash and kept on having a browser built with me in mind and I think plenty of others would have too. But very few people have the character to say no when that much money is waved in front of them.
There I would say you have gone too far, unless you actually know the folks that made that choice personally to know for sure. Staying funded at all was likely the goal – Open source funding is frequently its downside, and for such complex projects its almost always the downside. But as Google has ownership of the default browser, OS, and the advert machinery…
Creating an actually working browser for the modern website is going to require some degree of following Google’s lead, as they are the monopoly that defines the standards actually used in effect (with a bit of other giant corperate that don’t give a crap about us mixed in).
>Creating an actually working browser for the modern website is going to require some degree of following Google’s lead…
From scratch, sure. From the leading browser in the market at the time? Nah. They had an interstellar head start and could have kept a significant market share by doing absolutely nothing except keeping up with standards changes. It cost a lot of money to make things this much worse.
None of this head anything to do with “functional web browsers” it’s an attempt to increase revenue, and that is a direct conflict with user agency.
No buts. Every data harvester like this should be arrested, life imprisonment, for subverting democracy, countries, human life.
I’m sorry, but refusing to allow your not-for-profit browser that champions web freedom to be run by someone who’s spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to prevent a sizeable minority of the population from accessing their human rights isn’t merely “a privately made donation”. Regardless of Eich’s prior achievements or Mozilla’s subsequent direction, cutting Eich loose was the correct choice.
Yeah, getting rid of anyone who has a different opinion than you is always the morally just choice.
You said in another comment (which I can’t reply to) only authoritarians think inaction is political
You should be aware you’re calling Desmond Tutu, one of the most respected moral voices lately, authoritarian when he said
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality”
You defending morality here is a blatant contradiction with that condemnation of Tutu
Internet is not a human right. Try again.
It’s communication. It’s information. That’s like saying housing isn’t a human right because we used to live in caves.
This was the exact moment I stopped using them.
DuckDuckGo was not mentioned . What have I missed about it?
If you mean DuckDuckGo’s browser…I’ve tried it. Definitely an alpha version, tends to do some whacky stuff. Hopefully they’ll get to work on this Not Ready For Prime Time browser.
Duckduck is cooked, non-starter
The DuckDuckGo browser uses the built in rendering engine of the underlying OS. So on Android and Windows that’s Blink (Chromium), and on iOS and macOS it’s WebKit (Safari).
That’s why DuckDuckGo doesn’t count as a competitor to Chrome. Because, in part, it’s actually built upon Chrome. In the same way Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi and the like are.
Duck Duck Go is literally just a frontend for Bing. When Bing goes down, DDG goes down too.
LibreWolf is a hobby project that explicitly doesn’t accept donations. As such, I don’t view its development as sustainable, or its product a serious option for real work. So I’ll stick with Firefox-brand Firefox for now, and keep disabling all the semi-malware they decide to include. :(
Shame that Servo isn’t ready for real use yet, but I’m backing its development. :)
It follows upstream but removes all the spyware crap, it doesn’t need a ton of development.
It is not a “hobby” project at all! Community driven by volunteers does not mean it’s a hobby, although I suppose it is a hobby for some of the developers. That is like saying Linux is a hobby, or GNU is a hobby.
Although Linux was started by one man, as a personal project to create a better OS for his own needs it is now the basis of many many commercial products (Android anyone? Your router? This websites server?).
They don’t take donations simply to avoid having to beholden to donators and avoid the hassle that comes with accounting etc.
I haven’t seen any mention of Brave. Is there something I should know? Is it not as they describe it?
Brave is reskinned chrome, so most would just refer to it as chrome. It’s mentioned in the article when something like “why would you build a browser from the ground up when you can just copy off of the back of somebody else’s work”
It’s still based on Chromium, so it doesn’t provide any competition to Google’s dominance like Firefox does.
So using Chrome, basically a “reskinned KHTML” doesn’t provide any competition to KDE’s dominance, right? :-)
Apples and oranges.
Blink is a fork WebKit, which is a fork of KHTML. Blink is the browser engine that powers the Chromium project. Chromium is the open source base on which Chrome is built. Brave is downstream of Chromium.
Brave literally just takes a fresh copy of the chromium source code once every couple of weeks and runs a script to reskin it. It is to chrome what CentOS/rocky/alma are to RHEL.
Also, as I recall, it has a non-optional version of the same policy that is under discussion here.
To be fair, this is a positive initiative by Mozilla. Their words:
Mozilla is prototyping this feature in order to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.
This is a good thing they are trying.
Exactly. All ad companies are already doing non-privacy preserving ad tracking, at least unless you block cookies and external content.
I don’t think the Firefox effort will help, but I won’t blame them for trying.
A lot of people here *do* seem to be blaming them for trying. It’s kind of sad how they’re the only real (near-term) competitor to Chrome, yet tech-enthusiasts bash them for every decision they make to try and *stay* relevant.
Yes. The claim that this is bad seems entirely false.
You people sound like a bunch of, let’s say ‘US voters’.
They provide a link to the horse’s mouth.
And their Apple-esque story of how they are ‘helping’ you.
No we bash them for trying to implement chrome like features at every opportunity instead of continuing in their own direction.
If they really wanted to help, they’ll add a feature to confuse the invasive ad tracking.
This, exactly. There’s been plenty to legitimately criticize Mozilla for lately but this ain’t it. Instead it appears to be a legitimate attempt to preserve privacy that will, at worst, just fail to ever get any traction, and a complete nothingburger if you already use an adblocker since it only hands over (actually anonymized) data if you both *see* the ad and meet the metric for a “conversion”.
Hard disagree – this enabling and emboldening advertising companies. Firefox should not be on the side of the advertisers.
This is something already being done in a really obnoxious way being provided a lesser evil method.
The internet is something like a public library, except nobody pays for all the resources existence through taxation. And you don’t want every single website you visit charging your accounts for the connection and data you have consumed – that would be a tracking and security nightmare. So adverts it must be in large part, which means a way to make the adverts work better is good for everyone (if it gets adopted).
^^^ this, so many folks think websites should somehow be able to exist with zero advertising somehow – there has been a continuous arms-race of advertising and tracking / monetisation and if Firefox can bring some balance and compromise into that with a sensible feature I’m honestly all for it.
My main reasons for having various adblockers these days are not that I want to see ZERO adverts, it’s that I can’t trust ANY website not to be absolutely riddled with trackers and other privacy-invading nonsense in a desperate attempt to claw a few pennies of revenue out of my clicks.
If I could actually rely on websites being ethical about this stuff I’d even be inclined to whitelist a few sites that I wish to support.
Thats not a good thing, thats a good thing for advertisers and a good thing for trying to make more revenue.
So you are really happy with the current state of affairs? Even if you use an adblocker (and I expect most HAD readers do) somebody has to fund the hosting etc. Or do you want to pay a few pence every time you connect to a webpage or have to log in to your subscription to this site to make sure the resources you are using continue to exist…
This is a good way of allowing the web to be mostly funded by adverts and yet not be donating all your personal data to the internet at large, at least if it works as intended and actually gets adopted.
How I understood Mozilla’s statement: Despite best efforts to block trackers and similar technology, advertising companies are continually researching ways to ride roughshod over you and your privacy concerns. Rather than let this continue unchecked on our browser, we are offering advertising companies access to some anonymous data that lets them see whether or not their adverts land.
I’ll read more in to it. I’m likely leaving the option on.
It would have been nice (and open, and honest) for this article to give direct link to Mozilla’s statement. Without it, this is at best only half a story, at worst it is kneejerk reactionary bø11öcks.
Mozilla’s, in my eyes, have misstepped a few times since I started using which must have been it but in my eyes, Mozilla’s still, by a few dozen country miles, better than Alphabet/Google. Mozilla, to my knowledge, have not been sued for collecting user data generated in privacy mode. Google have.
Pale Moon is probably your best bet. I switched to it from FireFox around the Quantum era and have been pretty happy with it. It’s a pre-Quantum Firefox fork, with a massively updated rendering engine and is pretty lightweight on resources. I use it for virtually all of my browsing, especially literature research as it can fit hundreds of tabs within a fraction of the RAM that it’d take a Chromium-based browser (or modern Firefox).
Being able to use old-school extensions and plugins with Pale Moon is another major bonus, as you avoid all of the crazy Web Extensions nonsense that Google tries to cram down the throats of all Chromium-based browser users (which basically includes Firefox at this point).
I second the Pale Moon suggestion. Multi-process browsers are terrible RAM hogs. I do 500 loaded tabs and 500 suspended tabs in under 4GB of ram usage in PM. I only keep FF for my bank.
As for Firefox, the Android version just removed *URLS* from the browser. If that doesn’t tell you something I don’t know what will. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907373
Firefox on iOS has had some seemingly purposeful feature regressions lately too. They removed the setting to allow Private Browsing tabs to persist between sessions, which resulted in me losing a few hundred tabs. Firefox devs confirmed on the bug report forum that this was in fact intended behavior. I seriously wonder what’s going on over at Mozilla, this is kinda BS.
>>As for Firefox, the Android version just removed *URLS* from the browser. If that doesn’t tell you something I don’t know what will.
For people who know and care, that is a MAJOR regression. An example of why I say that: Amazon links have a LOT of tracking info embedded in the URL for any given product page. It’s very easy to separate the tracking crap from the very small part of the URL that actually gets you to said product page. I’m in the habit of deleting the usually-very-long ‘tail’ of the URL when I send an Amazon link to somebody else, because it’s ALL tracking data. If I don’t delete it, then Amazon gets all kinds of info – which they have no moral right to – regarding my relationships with friends and family.
I simply WON’T use a browser which doesn’t both display the complete URL and allow me to edit it as I see fit.
It would be a regression if true, but I don’t see any evidence of it? Granted, my phone is on 128.0 rather than Nightly or even Aurora, so maybe that’s the difference.
My Firefox for Android still displays urls, if this changes ill figure something, having a web browser that doesnt display urls is simply a horrible idea. They tried this once before on both Android and desktop I believe, I recall it didnt go over very well with the user base.
I used to like PM quite a bit but it’s very much a BDFL situation on that project and I’ve had too many disagreements with the way some technical things have been decided and how the project itself has been managed. May try it again after the bad taste in my mouth has faded a bit.
Agreed. Especially given Moonchild’s stance regarding – and tantrums around – the NoScript extension. I installed it anyway when I was using PM, but got tired of the attitude there. Your ‘bad taste in my mouth’ describes my feelings perfectly.
So I sucked it up and went back to FF. But now I’m getting tired of wrestling with their arbitrary and senseless UI ‘innovations’, as well as the degree to which they’ve already sold out their users and their own integrity. The best example I’ve seen of this comes from Mozilla after their acquisition of advertising company Anonym: “While there is no denying behavioral advertising is the underlying business model of the web today, it does not mean that it cannot be reformed to minimize its societal harms.” How to say you’re consciously selling out without using those words…
I may be going back to Pale Moon sooner rather than later.
How’s it chromium based? And what’s the web extension cramming? If you could explain. Because FF uses addons !
And none talked about waterfox?!
The funny thing is I got this news from Google app because Google knows my likes and dislikes, I wonder how bad is that a thing or not?!
I’ve been using Brave. Works good.
But I don’t know how it stacks up privacy-wise.
Google used to have an UNofficial motto of “Don’t be evil”. Never official and long since abandoned but there still seems to be a tiny sliver of it remaining in their old-timer developers. Compared to their big tech brethren Meta, Apple, and MicroShaft, they are still by far the least evil. And Mozilla has become another tentacle of Alphabet so until a truly functional and compatible alternative comes along, I’m using Chrome with a mix of some Firefox.
And I’m willing to tolerate SOME tracking and advertising. It pays for my favorite sites as opposed to needing to have a hundred different subscriptions. And if I have to look at ads, I’d rather look at ones for something that might, maybe, possibly, interest me. Maybe some new nifty thingamajig I didn’t know about, or that whatchamacallit I’ve been lusting over is now on sale. Better than ads for feminine hygiene products, pecker pills, and timeshares in Timbuktu.
does make one wonder how cable television had no advertisements for so long.
Well…. You paid for cable. That was the whole value proposition. You pay and the only ads you get are product placement.
But we’re still paying for cable, why are we still having ads, then?
“And if I have to look at ads, I’d rather look at ones for something that might, maybe, possibly, interest me.”
I’m the opposite – if I have to look at ads, I’d rather see the same ads as everyone else. #1 I don’t want the company to know enough about me to give me targeted ads, and #2 algorithm-customized content – including algorithm-customized ads – contributes to the “information silo” issue that is hurting modern American society.
“Information silo” really hits me. I like watching a lot of YT and its been frustrating at times.
So many recommendations for content I’ve already watched and if I want to expand and go to the front page it’s all Roblox, prank, kid garbage.
Perhaps if 5 million ordinary people got together and donated $100/year each, we might come close to out-donating Google.
Ack, Hackaday moved my post to the wrong thread. The 5M X $100 comment belongs below, under Titus431’s comment of July 14, 2024 at 8:05 am “$500 MILLION per year.”
Any company which would adopt that motto is obviously gonna do something horribly evil
$500 MILLION per year.
That’s what Google PAYS Mozilla.
Annually. And Mozilla is a not-for-profit. No taxes on that donation.
Thinking they’re somehow independent or “just suddenly” not privacy focused as much is absurd.
Mozilla has been a subsidiary of Google for YEARS. Just not in the traditional corporate sense.
I love this thing we have now where a company can basically just budget a fake tiny version of itself to keep on life support just so they don’t get whacked with trustbreaking and monopoly lawsuits. It’s so laughably fraudulent
You mean like how Microsoft rescued Apple, or Intel has been in limbo to screw over AMD and still keep it from falling somehow?
>Microsoft rescued Apple
Never happened. What did transpire tho was Microsoft being caught together with Intel stealing Apple code https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
and Jobs doing a deal with Gates agreeing to make it all go away (a year before DOJ case) for some token public investment and continued Word/Excel/IE support.
Without that deal DOJ would have murdered Microsoft.
I’m not very familiar so I ask those who know more: isn’t deselecting enough?
How can I disable PPA?
Firefox provides an easy simple option to disable the privacy-preserving attribution feature if users prefer not to participate. Websites will not know if you choose to opt out in this way.
To opt out, do the following:
Click the menu button Fx89menuButton and select Settings.
In the Privacy & Security panel, find the Website Advertising Preferences section.
Uncheck the box labeled Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement.
I’ve used librewolf for years, it’s a privacy respective fork of Firefox, can recommend.
For a while I’ve wished there was a nonprofit that makes a sort of reference implementation of web standards and other orgs can fork it and add their own gimmicks to it, but it’s way too late for that. As it stands chromium is sort of the reference implementation which is…… questionable.
Questionable indeed. Though with how big Google’s market ownership is I don’t think it would matter what anybody but them decides is the standard very much, maybe some of the other tech giants could push back on some areas – AWS hosts so very much for instance they have some influence on the shape of the internet.
Oh, the article is about *ad measurement*?
The ‘let us decide what you are and are not allowed to see checkbox’ is left unmentioned.
Of the maintained browsers that are not full of unpatched exploits, Firefox is the least worst simply because it is possible to mitigate the unwanted user-hostile behavior.
Firefox has a very useful feature, the user.js file you can create in a Firefox profile directory. It allows changing Firefox settings in mass, with comments documenting why each change was made, keeping track of changes with version control and it is as simple as copying a file to de-enshitify a new Firefox profile.
The user.js line that disables this “ad measurement” garbage is:
user_pref(“dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled”, false);
I have a build system for creating profiles for different purposes that combines common and profile specific user.js source snippets together into profile specific user.js files to ensure all firefox profiles are up to date with settings like the above, and that no setting change will ever be inadvertently dropped.
My default browsing profile’s consolidated user.js file is currently 465 lines (after stripping comments). Most of those lines are for disabling telemetry and mitigating other privacy violations.
Unfortunately, Mozilla has been moving settings from user.js into random sqlite and json files, so my build scripts also copy these blobs around (e.g., search engine settings, extension specific settings and zoom level settings have been moved). My default browsing profile has 6 sqlite/json blobs that have to be copied (not including extension .xpi files).
If Mozilla ever kills user.js completely, that is the day I will abandon Firefox.
Mozilla killing off user.js is a valid concern. Mozilla has threatened to kill user.js because a single platform, MS Windows, apparently takes forever to return from a check for a file’s existence, if the file does not exist. So, the check for user.js was making startup take longer on MS Windows– on other non-broken OSs this check is essentially instantaneous. But, the folks at Mozilla are threatening to gimp all platforms because a single OS platform has a broken file stat implementation.
Anyone trying TOR?
You mean for other than “shopping”?
No, nobody has used TOR ever in history.
Based on the comment I also suspect you have no idea what TOR actually is.
Glow in the dark internet
In Firefox’s “Settings” you can search for “data collection” before the “Website Advertising Preferences” section and you can search for “deceptive content” after it, but you get nothing for “advertising”. So if you want to turn it off, they spite you by making you dig it out the hard way.
No thanks, Mozilla
This is the same Mozilla demanding censorship on Whatsapp.
Do they censor other things already?
https://www.engadget.com/mozilla-urges-whatsapp-to-combat-misinformation-ahead-of-global-elections-200002024.html
Floorp is better than LibreWolf IMHO.
Also Thorium, despite of its errrm…. peculiar Dev, is a better choice than Brave on the Chromium side of things.
the should have at least put a pop up box up when doing the upgrade to confirm that users were happy with the tracking..
“The least they could have done, is what they did!”
-my cousin
I think the claim that this is some sort of evil plot by Mozilla is unreasonable. They’re trying to remove the incentive for advertisers to use nefarious means to track advertising clickthrough rates by providing a privacy protecting one that doesn’t give them personally identifiable information. You can read about it here:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution
And I think the claim that Firefox is now an advertising company or anything similar is totally wrong. They are, in fact, far more privacy protecting than Chrome and they work hard to constantly ratchet up the privacy and user protections in the browser.
>>And I think the claim that Firefox is now an advertising company or anything similar is totally wrong.
It’s true that they’re not an advertising company – they merely BOUGHT an advertising company:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/
I think the extended support release (ESR) version of firefox will be free of this? It usually doesn’t get the silly features they try in the main version. Have been on FF ESR for many years, since something silly they tried for normal firefox in about 2017/18 (might have been when they changed the way add-ons worked and I had to switch to ESR until the NoScript developer could catch up with the new add-ons method) add NoScript and AdBlockPlus and I’m happy.
the instant they included “pocket” in the installation i noped right out
“Mozilla … morphed into an advertising company”
Say what now?
All these folks in the comments convinced that Mozilla are evil and useless and everything else – what exactly are the *truly better* alternatives?
Like IE had DNT flag enabled by default so websites started to ignore DNT.
It’s hilarious to see people actively fighting against making ads less evil. Thank you for your service to the adtech industry, morons! I hope you’re at least being paid for it!
This is very confusing. I do actually whitelist a few places I do support and then I try to block the rest. I can understand why people are confused about sites because it’s like ‘oh it’s just data” but you have to have a server to run it on and people to pay to keep it running so you have to have SOME money involved…
I have unfortunately been stuck with Chrome on my phone lately; I need to get my desktop set up so I can save make sure all my settings get through it from chrome to mobile firefox. What I used to do was adblock just about everything except for the few sites I whitelist. People: “Why do sites have to cost stuff? They’re just code!” Well, because you have to have servers to run that stuff on and people to keep the sites running properly, and that costs money ! So, annoying as it is, ads are one way to keep that going.
I am not an expert (though compiled Firefox often from source in the past when there was no 64b version and waterfox was not yet). Google would be probably accused of monopolist practices if not Firefox. They did V8. There is chrome and chromium. JS engine is too strongly rooted in V8 currently with only gecko as an alternative. Electrolysis failed. Opera switched to WebKit. There is edge (and works quite well). Mozilla got too big – it is a corpo but I am going to support it as otherwise there would be only Google and we would be sold to marketing (we are already but there is still some freedom). I am still using links, links2, elinks, conqueror and similar but most of the time it is Firefox and chromium.
And on a daily usage I have up to 3000 tabs opened (mostly unloaded) in most sessions (I have a few for different topics). With script blocker, content blocker, advanced request control and custom content injection. Recently I rely more on LLM to navigate, read and extract data. I hope that current ecosystem of web pages would slowly become a niche with data oriented sources only while DOM would be still used along with more sophisticated CSS and scripting that is asynchronous, multi-threaded and declarative.
If anyone asked: I am using 128GB of RAM and 24 threads but Firefox could work well even on 4GB of RAM and 4 threads (though I wouldn’t use more than 1000 tabs on it).
Bobby Holly, CTO of Mozilla, has written a response about this issue on Reddit. I think you’ll find it interesting and illuminating on what is actually being done here. https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/
FYI, I’ve worked as an engineer for Mozilla for 13years, and on the project for 24. I was the lead engineer and deeply involved in the design of WebRTC in the IETF and W3C, and (with EKR – Eric Rescorla, former CTO of Mozilla) fought tooth and nail for end-to-end encryption being mandated in WebRTC. Google and the Telcos didn’t really care, but (with the help of Snowden’s disclosures) we did eventually win by landslide in the IETF to protect these communication channels.
Thank you for your work to help protect our privacy. 🍻
You know, if they designed ads to be ‘static’ and to the side and no scripting, I would not have a problem with them. Just like the old ‘news paper’ (remember those?) . If one felt interested in a product, then click on the url and off you go. Seems soooo simple. Instead they embed video, sound, trackers, in your face adverts. No way… So on go the ad blockers, and pi-hole to stop the nonsense.
To me the internet should ‘free’ you from ‘forced’ in your face adverts when visiting/using a site. Unlike TV (don’t even have one) or Radio (don’t listen very often) where you are ‘forced’ to watch and listen if you are interested in a program.
I hear your wish… but if you want that, you need to figure out a *workable* way to pay for these sites you want to visit — including this site, which I don’t think you’re paying for. Which means paywalls everywhere at minimum… or a big complex way to charge people to “access the internet” and then distribute that (i.e. recreate AOL walled gardens).
Oh, and I do use Firefox (Linux). Meets my needs and has since it was first introduced in Windoze land. See no need to jump ship.
See a detailed post by Andrew Moore (someone who absolutely hates advertising) about this: https://andrewmoore.ca/blog/post/mozilla-ppa/
tl;dr:
“Mozilla’s PPA initiative shifts metrics and tracking away from tracking you as an individual, towards tracking the ad campaign in a personal privacy preserving way. The way those metrics are collected ensures individual privacy, and enables advertisers to measure the success of a campaign without having to track you.
As someone who really values personal privacy, and despises advertising and tracking, I will be keeping PPA enabled in my browsers as it reduces the incentive from AdTech companies to track in an invasive way. It also simplifies my blocking of telemetry as I only have the DAP service endpoints to block.”
I disabled the setting and moved on with my life because it doesn’t matter. Like seriously and for reals. I’ve been with Firefox since it was Firebird and Phoenix and I’ll be with Firefox until the bitter end. That’s the great thing about being able to fork an open source project. I wasn’t born with enough middle fingers to shove in Google’s face.
Come on Hackaday, is it necessary to stoop so low?
Yes, dubious decision on Mozillas side.
But why are you pushing clickbait instead of reporting on the actual mechanism? Please do your duties and explain this feature to laymen like myself instead of fueling the fire. Is it really so easy to just dismiss the whole effort? Does it necessarily have to be worse than the abysmal shit-show of a state the internet is in right now? I don’t know about any of this, and I’d like to come to hackaday to learn about this, not be fed mindless triggers.
And _please_ be fair enough to not paint Firefox in a worse light than the market-distorting armada of Chromium reskins. It is still the only independent rendering engine viable for mainstream use. Is that suddenly worth nothing anymore?
The Mozilla Foundation takes almost $500 million every year just to configure Google as preferred search engine.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/15/21370020/mozilla-google-firefox-search-engine-browser
I wonder what incentive does the Mozilla Foundation have to turn Firefox as real competition for Chrome. I see a huge conflict of interests here.
Well…. I actually read Mozilla’s description of this.
It seems to be a way to let the sites you visit get ad credit when you come back and buy the thing in the ad later rather than immediately stop what you were doing to click the ad right away. And by keeping a local list of the ads you have seen and where it is able to do this without sending the advertiser a whole list of places you have been, just the relevant one as opposed to ordinary tracking.
I can see the argument that one might not like this for privacy reasons.
I can see the argument for not enabling it by default and/or alerting the user that it is enabled.
OTOH, how many people would go and enable it themselves?
How many people when given a popup would read it, think about it and decide to say yes as opposed to instinctively clicking no?
Do you not want the people who create the content you need/want/enjoy to get paid for it? I mean sure, some content is intentionally free and open where the writer does not expect any compensation. But even that incurs hosting fees to someone!
Do you like paywalls?
How DO you want to see the development of all the internet content and it’s hosting subsidized?
Not entirely pertinent to this exact issue but related… While I do think all these companies having detailed records of me, my interests and preferences… I also remember what it was like before all internet tracking. I remember all the totally untargeted ads. Today when I use the internet I get ads for tools, components, geeky maker things that I like. Before tracking I remember internet ads as being mostly ED pills and feminine hygine products!
Privacy be damned, I prefer how it is today.
Shorter version.. allowing this feature to run ups the odds that the content YOU are interested in will be funded!
As opposed to the content all those “normies” on Chrome that don’t know or care how to disable tracking features are in to.
You are getting an internet full of fluff either way but wouldn’t you like it to also be an internet full of hacker/maker stuff?
1. I have yet to buy anything based on web advertising (mostly because I have uBlock to remove ads from web pages.]
2. If I did buy something based on an ad, I don’t see how anyone could tie the two events. I use several computers and a smartphone for surfing – not as obfuscation, but just because I use whichever is at hand for whatever I’m doing. They’d have to be monitoring all the computers and linking data from them all.
Block the freaking ads, protect your privacy.
PWA, WebKit(or whatever the hell the Chromium project calls it)/Gecko, modular sync options.
These are my essentials. Eveeything else I can get from extensions. Whichever browser does that better, I prefer.
At the moment, that is Chrome(though I am running Firefox as a test). All the tin hat shxt that I use and love comes from extensions.
Anyone who cares about these issues and commented here should read Mike Hoye’s take on this, and related things. Preview: it actually recounts a physical fistfight over these issues.
https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112796320358063895