Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox 125
An anonymous reader writes: Firefox's privacy mode stops your computer from keeping track of where you've browsed, but it doesn't do anything about external tracking. A new feature just rolled out to the Developer Edition and the Aurora channel now actively tries to block online services from tracking you. "Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you're sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide." The feature uses a blocklist maintained by Disconnect.me to stop you from navigating to sites known to log your personal data.
Is it just me... (Score:4, Insightful)
or does this seem like an ass backwards way of "protecting" privacy?
Re: (Score:1)
Can't be any more 'backwards' than DNT which was doomed to fail on the starting blocks.
Re: (Score:3)
Or the "privacy mode" that recorded sites you visited with blocked plugins: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s... [mozilla.org] - oh wait, it still does that.
Re: (Score:1)
i just want you guys to know - i have a very, very large penis. don't be jealous.
Hello my stalker, how are you today? Cowardly as usual I see.
Desperation due to FF's collapsing marketshare? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, panic has started to set in at Mozilla. They're starting to see that Firefox's marketshare has fallen through the floor [caniuse.com].
We're talking about a browser that once had over 30% of the market reduced down to around 9% lately. Firefox for Android has been an abject failure at around 0.15% of the market. There's no presence on iOS. Firefox OS is totally irrelevant.
Chrome for Android alone has about twice as many users as all versions of Firefox have! iOS Safari has about the same number of users that Firefox does. IE 11 alone has almost as many users, and that's even after IE has suffered a similar freefall from its once lofty heights. Firefox's numbers are even approaching those of Opera Mini!
Mozilla only has any relevance today because of Firefox. We see very little use of Mozilla's other offerings. Thunderbird saw some use, until Mozilla essentially put it on life support. Firefox OS has been a complete failure. Bugzilla is seen as old and outdated. Servo is embryonic, and unusable. Rust was infected by Ruby hypesters fleeing the sinking Ruby on Rails ship, and took forever to get even a mediocre 1.0 release out.
Although Mozilla hasn't seemed too willing to acknowledge the massive problem facing Firefox, maybe it's finally starting to sink in. Maybe they've finally realized that when a browser has 30% of the market, then 25%, then 20%, then 15%, then 12%, and now only 9%, something is wrong.
When it gets to the point that almost nobody is using Firefox, Mozilla will lose what little influence they have left. The only reason that they have any influence today is because of their past success with Firefox, but that was an increasingly long time ago. Will Yahoo keep throwing money at Mozilla when Firefox only has 1% or less of the market? It's doubtful!
Maybe they're starting to realize the disaster that awaits them, as an organization. I think we're starting to see them panic. Instead of listening to their users, they're throwing shit against the wall in a frenzy, trying to see what sticks. That's what the ads in Firefox have been about. That's what Pocket has been about. That's what Hello has been about. That's what junk like this is about. It's just one knee-jerk reaction after another, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the future of Firefox and Mozilla is looking bleaker and bleaker.
I wanted to see Mozilla succeed. They used to be a very respected organization, up there with the FSF and the Apache project. Yet they've done so much to drive away so many of Firefox's users. Their smugness has become their undoing, throwing them into the self-destructive spiral we see now. The worst part is that none of this was necessary! If only they had listened to Firefox's users, rather than forcing one shitty thing after another upon these users, then Mozilla wouldn't be in such a bad position today. Firefox would still be seen as an innovative, powerful browser that people want to use, rather than the mockery and the awful Chrome imitation that it has become today. It didn't have to be like this!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You are wrong, and this is because Scrum is not agile !
If you use only Scrum, you cannot succeed because Scrum is for managers, not for developers.
For developers, you can use Extreme Programming, DevOps or Kanban, but please do not force developers to use Scrum, it's absolutely useless for them.
The devs should have the authority to not commit to a particular feature/tech/UX/whatever in a given time period.
When do the devs have some power in a company ?
The problem is that the business guys want more and more features, so they try to cram as much possible tasks as possible.
As a dev, you don't have time to polish your co
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Desperation due to FF's collapsing marketshare? (Score:5, Insightful)
It lost a lot of share to Chrome because,well, Chrome was better. Rather than standing still, FireFox has been improving steadily for years, I'd recommend it over Chrome today.
Then you have the noisy idiots. That's mostly Slashdot, but the stupidity tends to spread like spilled ink. Privacy hawks bitch and moan over things that often aren't even true, then recommend the worst browser on the market in terms of privacy (see above). Take a look at the prefetch flap-up further down the front page, the reality is so far away from the nonsense that dominates that thread it boarders on the absurd. More commonly, you'll hear about the mysterious memory leak issues (many of which simply didn't exist) from a bygone era. Times have changed, kids, get with it.
The weirdest of all, naturally, is the bitching and moaning over Australis. So upset these yahoos are over the change that they vow to switch to Chrome. No, I'm not kidding. I'll bet a nickle you'll find one in this thread.
I've been recommending FF for XP users over Chrome for a while because it was undeniably better on those older machines. I've been recommending it now because it's better everywhere else now as well. (Cue the "no it's not because of minor feature x" comments.) That it's also better for philosophical reasons is a nice bonus.
Chrome gained market share because people like you and I recommend it over the alternatives. We recommended it because it was, hands-down, the best browser on the market. Times have changed. Rather than bitching and moaning about how it's not perfect, pushing people away from such an incredibly important product, we should instead promote it as the better browser. FF will regain market share the same way it lost it.
(There are other factors that may help that shift along. Kids have already started to discover that a lot of the games they play simply won't work on Chrome after they dropped NPAPI support. I've already noticed a shift to FF among that demographic in my tiny corner of the world.)
I switched back to FF about a year ago when they updated the UI. I stayed with it because it performed noticeably better than Chrome. Why wouldn't I recommend it over the privacy nightmare that is Chrome?
Re: (Score:1)
> But I'll bet you don't because, like the rest of us, you know that Chrome is far superior to Firefox. It's just faster and more secure, period. If you care about security at all, you recommend Chrome.
[[Citation needed]]. The opposite is true, as Chrome does not care privacy which is one important aspect of security.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong [mozilla.org]
And really wrong [mozilla.org]
The last work posted there by Nicholas Nethercote was December 11, 2014 - hardly a bygone era. He basically stopped posting about every little find around 2012, but kept making improvements to memory analysis tools used to improved Firefox. I'm sure you'll read a few sentences and tell me I'm an idiot so
Re: (Score:2)
Mozilla gets most of its funding from Google and Google has no desire for Mozilla to succeed.
Re: (Score:1)
Mozilla gets most of its funding from Yahoo and Yahoo has no desire for anything to succeed.
Fixed that for you both.
Re: (Score:1)
This all sounds really good, but anyone who's actually been paying attention to what they've been doing (bug trackers, mailing lists, etc) knows that they've been spending years bringing an ancient codebase up to spec, so they didn't lose more users. That, together that with the breakage such a task incurs, the way they are shut out from putting Firefox on competitor's mobile OSes (not even as a default on Android), the various tricks Google has pulled, general PR nightmares, and a constant negativity train
Re: Desperation due to FF's collapsing marketshare (Score:1)
But I still don't really understand why they should lose market share. After all, they've done all the same hipster shit as all the others like removing menu and tool bars and making parts of the UI hide themselves; surely this being-the-same-as-everyone-else approach should be enough to differentiate themselves in the market?
Re: (Score:2)
Firefox has gone from a lean, mean, browsing machine to a doughnut-gobbling couch potato who gets winded walking to the refrigerator.
It's sad to see it slowly becoming more and more bloated, dis-functional. The UI has become more frustrating too. At least the memory-eating function is still working. At ~3.5G of memory used it slows down, refuses to load some images, and generally becomes very clunky and laggy to use.
Re: Desperation due to FF's collapsing marketshare (Score:2)
I'm a. Old fuddee dudie. Even though I have Chrome and other browsers, I always return to Firefox. With it I am more confident of my browsing privacy than with any other browser. Eventually, when your deepest secrets are on the web, will you say "I didn't know Chrome did that or the other browser leaked my info. Sure Ff is a little slower, but I believe my browsing history belongs to me and me one. Bye bye Chrome, Chromium and all the leaky rest.
Re:Is it just me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Wrong kind of ass - http://image1.masterfile.com/e... [masterfile.com] but if that's your thing https://emfguy.files.wordpress... [wordpress.com]
Re: (Score:3)
and yet (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yet still, your beliefs are wrong. That simply doesn't happen.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any deeper explanation for your assertion that this "speculative pre-connection" behavior "simply doesn't happen", narcc? That it truly is a "figment of Slashdot's collective imaginations"? Because it seems to me that you may have reached that point where a shitty, condescending attitude
Re: (Score:2)
Do you have any deeper explanation for your assertion that this "speculative pre-connection" behavior "simply doesn't happen"
Yes, I do. You would as well, if you took half-a-second to look in to the issue.
Those speculative connections happen only on a few specific parts of the UI, not on any random webpage. So the "speculative pre-connection" "automatically connecting to every single hyperlink on the page" and you're slightly narrower "just moused-over links" (the implication being that it happens on random web pages) simply doesn't happen.
You're spreading nonsense. Stop it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That's because the issue you've described simply doesn't exist. It's a figment of Slashdot's collective imaginations.
There's also no option to prevent it from attracting tigers, stealing your soul, or taking your sandwich from the breakroom fridge.
Re: (Score:2)
That is about as far from the truth as you can get. The article showed how to very simply disable that behaviour.
Start with "Normal Mode" (Score:5, Insightful)
"Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you're sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide."
I'd say people want more control over their privacy even when they aren't going full-tilt in Private Browser Mode.
You know what a contributing factor is in loss of privacy? A browser that has web services and features built-in that rely on third-party companies.
Re: (Score:3)
To be fair, that's not true at all.
They've changed a lot. They're worst than before.
Re: (Score:3)
Right. Start with things like randomising the list of fonts that you claim is installed (or only advertise the web fonts set on every Firefox install). Don't allow JavaScript to enumerate plugins, unless on trusted sites. Don't allow JavaScript to tell whether a link has been coloured as followed (including when rendering via a canvas!).
Incorporate the self-destructing cookies plugin by default: cookies are automatically deleted when you leave a page, unless you explicitly opt in to keeping them (the
Re: (Score:3)
I'd love a "keep cookies until" setting that behaves similarly to sessionStorage: every tab gets its own cookie jar which lasts until the tab closes, but the jar can be shared in certain situations (middle-clicking on a link to the same domain, for example). There are a number of policy details to get right to make this non-intrusive, but I believe this is the way to go.
Ain't Gonna Happen (Score:2)
"Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you're sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide."
Gee, you think? Call MENSA...this guy is a freakin' genius!
This ain't gonna happen, because advertisers. If Firefox could be made untrackable advertisers would do everything to make the internet unviewable to Firefox users.
Re: (Score:1)
Surf the web faster, get Chrome.
Re: (Score:2)
citation required.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Google are the advertisers, Chrome is their answer and they push it very successfully to people who do google searches and of course Android phones and tablets are a big success for them - which come with Chrome and google search etc as standard.
"Surf the web faster, get Chrome." is roughly what you see occasionally if you google for something with a non-chrome browser.
Re: (Score:2)
Chrome is the herpes of web browsing.
Re: (Score:1)
Chrome with all the crap removed: Comodo Dragon [comodo.com].
The Comodo Secure Browser is supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements. Advertisements may relate to the content of information as part of the Product or queries made through the Product. The Product may include hyperlinks to other websites or content that Comodo may have no control over or are provided by an entity other than Comodo. You agree that Comodo may place such advertising with the Product in exchange for granting you access to use the Product.
No thanks.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Spied on faster, get Chrome.
just an NSA flag (Score:2)
Firefox only pays lip service to privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Firefox has become a megacorporation. They are not for profit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... [pbs.org] so that money doesn't to shareholders but it goes SOMEWHERE like executive salaries and just like a megacorporation they care more about cutting deals with other businesses than they do the public because we are not their customers. They are!
Re: (Score:2)
Google was paying Firefox $300M a year http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/... [webmonkey.com] before they pulled the plug and Firefox reached a deal with Yahoo, and they switched searches to Yahoo -- not because it was the better search engine, but because Yahoo was giving them cash
Mozilla's existence is completely dependent on other companies, whose existence is completely dependent on tracking and monetizing you. For Mozilla to pretend that they care about "privacy" insults our intelligence (what little we have).
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Mozilla's existence is completely dependent on other companies, whose existence is completely dependent on tracking and monetizing you. For Mozilla to pretend that they care about "privacy" insults our intelligence (what little we have).
I work at Mozilla, and whilst I'm happy that the company is financially viable, let me assure you that this is not the first priority of the management team!
Management at Mozilla have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to throw resources at risky projects without any monetization strategy: Firefox OS, WebRTC, BrowserId/Persona, WebGL, asm.js (gaming on the web), WebVR (Virtual Reality on the Web), Daala (Video codec).
So make no mistake management as well as most of the employees at Mozilla
Re: (Score:2)
about:config
privacy.trackingprotection set to true
Something like that
about:config contains no such setting for "privacy.trackingprotection" or "Something like that"
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, it does. There's a preference named "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled".
Re: (Score:1)
Let this AC help you. You need to look for this on the config page:
network.http.speculative-parallel-limit
and set it to 0.
Re: (Score:3)
privacy.trackingprotection.enabled
That took all of two seconds to find by typing "privacy" in about:config.
As a bonus, you can toggle privacy.donottrackheader.enabled to true for a faster browsing experience.
Re: (Score:1)
As a long time Mozilla employee - this is not completely incorrect.
Some things we do, like, erm, pocket, you know, are extremely unpopular within the company but are force-fed by execs (which are in the 500k/y salary range with ensured 30-40% bonus).
Re: (Score:2)
I have bad news for you, but everything you do that is a one time thing involves " setting so obscure can't remember it". There is this handy tool called documentation, and another tool called Google that lets you quickly and efficiently locate said documentation. Your complaint that you can't remember it off the top of your head is frigging ridiculous. There is a reason why the 'man' comman
Mozilla don't care about privacy. (Score:2)
Mozilla have a privacy tab where you can't actually set the important privacy options like:
[Bug 959893] WebRTC Internal IP Address Leakage :: 'RESOLVED WONTFIX '
Bug 814169 - introduce preference for controlling speculative pre-connections :: 'RESOLVED WONTFIX'
Dozens more things not mentioned on the new god-awful looking privacy tab.
typo (Score:1)
Mozilla should care a LOT more about privacy (Score:1)
Performance, portability, openness aside (there are many contenders here today), the main reason I use Firefox is because guys at Mozilla Foundation *seem* to care about my privacy *a bit* more than others. Or rather, they haven't designed Firefox from ground up to suck as much information about me as they can get away with.
Unfortunately, even though the potential is clearly here, Firefox does very little to actively protect my privacy. All the killer privacy features are pushed out to extensions. In 201
Note quite... (Score:1)
I can't speak for everybody, but I use it when I want to surf porn, but don't want to have to log out of everything before, and clear my cache after. They might as well just call it "Pornsurfin' mode" To really one-up their feature-set, they could change the default search to Bing.