9 ms·

Make Firefox Private Again

445 points by eloy 2y ago

ikekkdcjkfke 2y ago
Giving arbitrary actors control to target you and load whatever they want in your browser window is an uneeded liability. I have seen for myself people getting scammed by ads. No one was held accountable.
adr1an 2y ago
I'm fine with Firefox finding ways to compete with Chrome. For me, its survival depends upon it. And with its survival, we get all sort of forks (tor browser, librewolf, and so on) for niche users like HN readers commenting here and myself (Yes, privacy is niche. I would like a different reality, but that's how it is.)
stuartd 2y ago
A bash script to set a config value…? I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away. Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy. I’ll still block them, though. [0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.css https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)
- Terr_ 2y ago
  The actual change-commands aren't actually that much longer than its worrisome instructions telling you to download unpredictable arbitrary data from an internet URL and blindly execute it.
  - deadbolt 2y ago
    "Concerned about your privacy? Don't worry, just pipe this code right to your shell" :\ Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?
  - shiomiru 2y ago
    A picture-based guide seems both safer and more effective. e.g. many Firefox users run Windows, where curl | sh doesn't even work - clicking on the right buttons also requires less technical expertise.
    - sn0wleppard 2y ago
      You don't even have to go to about:config - it's got a checkbox on the user settings page!
- account42 2y ago
  > Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy. This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.
replete 2y ago
My guess is that this[0] means we might see some manifest v3 type stuff happen in the future as ad blocking becomes a conflict of interest for Mozilla. [0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...
mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement. No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem. I turned it off in about:config
- Buttons840 2y ago
  Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kelnos 2y ago
    That's the thing... people would still make free content, and since there wouldn't be as many shady ways to monetize, it would cut down on low-effort (and AI-generated) garbage. The internet would be such a better place. We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage. The high effort non-garbage stuff is produced by professionals who have the luxury of spending a full work week's amount of time improving their craft. writers writing free content with no business model can't do that unless they have a trust fund. which, I suppose they're out there, but I doubt the number of those that are writers.
3np 2y ago
Here is the actual script, if you prefer copy-pasting a one-liner over curl|sh... echo 'user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);' | tee -a $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$(grep "Default=.*\.default*" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" | cut -d"=" -f2)/user.js
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google
- the_third_wave 2y ago
  They should concentrate on developing the browser and get out of political activism entirely. Use the rather large amount of money they already have as an investment fund to finance a slimmed-down operation while also soliciting donations from users and some select companies. Ditch the large administrative staff they gained during the Baker years, swap some of them out for developers. They should not try to be a PAC, there's enough of those already.
  - rnd0 2y ago
    Wouldn't this be a case where the iron law of bureaucracy applies? Meaning that the people who are already there and are invested in their 'mission' would resist any kind of reform of the organization because the primary task of any such organization is protecting itself from outsiders?
    - account42 2y ago
      Yes, but only because the Mozilla Foundation has the same problem. If it was just the corporation then the foundation could decide to replace it entirely.
      - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
        Is the corporation the piece that builds the browser?
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    [flagged]
- 2y ago
OutOfHere 2y ago
`dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled` already was false. If you're having to set it manually in `about:config`, you're likely missing something bigger in `about:preferences#privacy`.
- kelnos 2y ago
  Odd, it was 'true' for me, and I have all the privacy stuff in there set to the most private of settings. There was one section in there with an option labeled: > Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox. I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
- sn0wleppard 2y ago
  Yeah, I'd already turned it from the standard settings page.
- remram 2y ago
  Do you know if there's a GUI setting that controls that on mobile?
jmakov 2y ago
Can this be also disabled on Android?
- kelnos 2y ago
  Sure, about:config works there as well. Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.
  - cma 2y ago
    Google likely pays them to disable about:config on Android or implies they won't pay them as much for default search and they read the tea leaves. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-about-config/idi-p/8071 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo... It only works on the more insecure nightly version of firefox.
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      I just checked this config value on my Firefox Nightly and it's already preset to false. Interesting.
      - remram 2y ago
        Maybe you had turned it off last time this was on the front-page? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112 That's what I suspect for my own setting anyway.
    - kilburn 2y ago
      This is equivalent to about:config and works on the regular firefox mobile version too: chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
      - cma 2y ago
        Didn't work for me just now. When there have been ways in the past the non-nightly version wipes the changes each restart unless they are already exposed in settings I think.
kelnos 2y ago
This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow. Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.
- roca 2y ago
  Then I think it's only fair for you to completely stop using ad-supported sites and services, right away. (Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)
  - bux93 2y ago
    What do you mean you don't want to sleep with me? It's a date! I paid for dinner! - advertisers
    - roca 2y ago
      It's actually: you say you want to live in a world where there are no ads, and therefore no ad-supported content. Well, with a little self-restraint you can live in that world right now. What, you don't like that world after all?
    - LunaSea 2y ago
      "It's not stealing, I'm just freely accessing your paid content" - users
      - nmeagent 2y ago
        "Officer, arrest this man! He had the gall to show up at my site and only consume some of the content I tried to shove into his face!"
      - anononaut 2y ago
        They can always refuse to serve me anything. That's equally fair.
account42 2y ago
curl | sh for THIS? Riiight, let's give that website permission to execute arbitrary code on your computer just to change a single FF preference? Really????
- clemailacct1 2y ago
  I think this is a bit of a sensational take. The code being executed is all there without obfuscation.
  - account42 2y ago
    Not at all. The code that you see is not guaranteed the code that curl will receive. And even if you check the curl output, if you run it a second time to pipe to sh it might receive something different.
zczc 2y ago
More privacy-related about:config settings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_about_config_privacy_tweeks https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_...
- Hard_Space 2y ago
  Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined here. There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings. Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
  - layer8 2y ago
    > it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.
    - Hard_Space 2y ago
      Yes, my monthly profile backup would have been worth repeating before this experiment. If anyone knows how to make a 7Zip archive of a live and running Firefox profile, I would back up far more regularly - but Firefox's lock state foils the backup, meaning I have to close down Firefox to archive the profile.
SCdF 2y ago
I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly! Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(
- trustno2 2y ago
  There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux (there must be some...) GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported https://webkit.org/downloads/ https://webkit.org/downloads/ https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/ https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/ It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.
  - sulandor 2y ago
    > There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux webkit was forked from the kde browser, not the other way.
    - trustno2 2y ago
      So? Epiphany is based on WebKit now, KDE Browser doesn't exist anymore. (I needed to check it first.)
      - graemep 2y ago
        Its called Konqueror, and exists, but it uses a webkit fork now! Webkit was forked from KHTML which has been discontinued.
        sulandor 2y ago
        i guess we are both right. thx for the clarification
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    No good adblocking for safari like in firefox though
Yodel0914 2y ago
I recently switched to LibreWolf[0] and, after tweaking a few settings that were more zealous that I'd like, it has been just as good as vanilla FF. 0: https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/
- eitland 2y ago
  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 checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so. So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying. If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
  - michael9423 2y ago
    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 for your personal preferences. Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to." Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork. People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user. And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.
willywanker 2y ago
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 extension support and the full customizability that went with it (including full support for full themes that can make it resemble Chrome or modern Firefox if you want to).
- efilife 2y ago
  https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/palemoon 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
  - willywanker 2y ago
    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 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.
- luuurker 2y ago
  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, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.
Vinnl 2y ago
Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...
- pacifika 2y ago
  Yup making this change will result in a slower move away from the current worse situation, which is less private then the proposed Mozilla future, is my reading.
  - thoroughburro 2y ago
    Because advertisers will voluntarily give up their other tracking tools? Does that sound likely?
- red_trumpet 2y ago
  He doesn't explain how it works though, or why it is private. Only that we should trust them.
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    Incidentally this was published just now! https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
    - incidentally 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - Vinnl 2y ago
      Oh, a flagged-dead throwaway comment pointed this out, but I guess it's fair to make explicit: I do work for Mozilla, but as an engineer, on an unrelated project. And I care about Mozilla and it's mission - so just sharing relevant links I came across on a personal title :)
cjpearson 2y ago
I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.) If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets. 1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad 2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad 3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo. Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.
- perchlorate 2y ago
  Advertisers are going to use it as just another data point, though. Why give them any more information than they already have? You know some of the best technical people we have waste their lives working for advertisers, and they _will_ find a way to extract more information from these technologies regardless of how supposedly private they are. I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance. I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
  - roca 2y ago
kreyenborgi 2y ago
https://support.mozilla.org/no/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution 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)_/¯ ). ----- 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".)
- remram 2y ago
  Did you find a way on mobile, other than browsing to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml and finding dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled?
yu3zhou4 2y ago
Author mentions this: https://web.archive.org/web/20181120211720/https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ 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?
- perchlorate 2y ago
  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.
red_admiral 2y ago
What I'd really like is to edit the file (sqlite database?) where my "ad topics" are stored. Just because I search for X once doesn't mean I want to see ads about it in future. Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.
red_admiral 2y ago
From the CEO's comments on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...): > we support people configuring their browser however they choose I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.
- phendrenad2 2y ago
  That was the moment I uninstalled FF and never went back. Truly icky behavior.
- bravetraveler 2y ago
  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
  - takluyver 2y ago
    I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance. I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
    - bjord 2y ago
      it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one
DavideNL 2y ago
Strange, apparently the setting (dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled) still hasn't been added to Arkenfox user.js ? I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js
pointlessone 2y ago
Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  OTOH the script is 2 lines long and perfectly readable/understandable.
- spinningslate 2y ago
  The site covers all bases. The content of the script is shown on the landing page - and you have to visit it to see the instructions to run it. The comment also explains how to do it through through the configuration UI. That means you have 3 choices: * Use curl to run the script as directed * copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run * follow the instructions to update through the UI.
  - eloy 2y ago
    Author here, thanks! I just thought it was fun to make kind of a polyglot shell script-blog post :D "yeah but you could serve a different page with the curl UA" ok, then you just change about:config?
- olejorgenb 2y ago
  It annoys me that Firefox removed the ability to link directly to a setting in `about:config`. I'm almost certain this was possible before.
LordShredda 2y ago
It's disabled on Arch by default. Maybe choose an operating system that doesn't treat you like a product?
nonrandomstring 2y ago
Since my post critical of Mozilla is being rather savagely downvoted I'll just leave this here [0] [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/ https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/
jqpabc123 2y ago
There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising. This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required. "Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week. "Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case. This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend. The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?
- brezelgoring 2y ago
  Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist. Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
  - rcxdude 2y ago
    All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook). If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper. This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue. [0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.
kuon 2y ago
Do you know the list of domain we can block to do this at the firewall level? I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).
clcaev 2y ago
Perhaps we could have a search engine that indexes only pages free of advertising?
horsawlarway 2y ago
Ditch Mozilla. Full stop. They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.
- baliex 2y ago
  Where do you propose we go instead?
  - horsawlarway 2y ago
    Personally - I use ungoogled-chromium, librewolf, and ladybird. The first two are still fairly dependent on the upstream companies - but at least they're ripping out the junk - They are pragmatic solutions in the short term. Ladybird is nicely independent in the sense that's truly one of the few offerings that isn't a derivative of Firefox/Chromium, but it's not "ready" yet for most daily uses. But seriously - please don't fall for the Mozilla marketing that Firefox is some privacy beacon as an alternative to Chrome. It's marketing not reality.
m878m78 2y ago
[dead]
modzu 2y ago
mozilla going all in on advertising as a hedge against losing their google funding? it is sad. i support brave, but if brave went away whats left? did we lose?
leotravis10 2y ago
You have to make even more steps to make it somewhat more private although keep in mind, it's not for everyone: https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefully.html#tweaking-firefox https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefull... Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918
robaxisal 2y ago
when will people learn that piping scrips from internet to sh, is very insecure.... # curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh sigh
dinozarw 2y ago
# How to use: # curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh Can we please stop telling people to pipe curl into sh?
oriettaxx 2y ago
I can't wait to have Kagi/Orion browser available in my laptop (already in my iphone, SUPER!)

445 points by eloy 2y ago

Giving arbitrary actors control to target you and load whatever they want in your browser window is an uneeded liability. I have seen for myself people getting scammed by ads. No one was held accountable.

adr1an 2y ago

I'm fine with Firefox finding ways to compete with Chrome. For me, its survival depends upon it. And with its survival, we get all sort of forks (tor browser, librewolf, and so on) for niche users like HN readers commenting here and myself (Yes, privacy is niche. I would like a different reality, but that's how it is.)

stuartd 2y ago

A bash script to set a config value…? I’ve been blocking ads in Firefox since you used CSS to do it [0] but let’s face it, advertising isn’t going away. Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy. I’ll still block them, though. [0] https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.css https://www.gozer.org/mozilla/ad_blocking/css/ad_blocking.cs... (love it that site is still up!)

Terr_ 2y ago
The actual change-commands aren't actually that much longer than its worrisome instructions telling you to download unpredictable arbitrary data from an internet URL and blindly execute it.
- deadbolt 2y ago
  "Concerned about your privacy? Don't worry, just pipe this code right to your shell" :\ Setting the flag in about:config is simple enough, I don't understand why anyone would do anything else. Who's seeing this page who is also unable to make an about:config change?
- shiomiru 2y ago
  A picture-based guide seems both safer and more effective. e.g. many Firefox users run Windows, where curl | sh doesn't even work - clicking on the right buttons also requires less technical expertise.
  - sn0wleppard 2y ago
    You don't even have to go to about:config - it's got a checkbox on the user settings page!
account42 2y ago
> Advertising is annoying, but tracking is evil and I hope initiatives like this can pave the way to having ads while not compromising user privacy. This is wishful thinking. As long as ads exists they are going to grab as much information about you as possible. All this does is give them additional information to add to whatever they are already doing.

replete 2y ago

My guess is that this[0] means we might see some manifest v3 type stuff happen in the future as ad blocking becomes a conflict of interest for Mozilla. [0]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_betting_privacy/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/18/mozilla_buys_anonym_b...

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago

wasn't aware that 'anonym' existed. I don't care if PII is stripped or not. the answer to 'helping advertisers' or anything with advertisement metrics in any fashion is always 'No.' - training things so that there's better data on how to best manipulate our psyche / give people data to psychologically manipulate us in to buying/doing things is a hard 'No.' > Asked whether Mozilla has any concerns that its user base, many ardent ad-blockers among them, will oppose Anonym, a spokesperson for the Firefox house told The Register advertising as a business model is what allows the internet to be free and open to everyone, though there's still room for improvement. No, the internet being free and open is what allows advertisers to exploit us. They can find other business models other than advertisement. It's not our problem. They need to stop making it our problem. I turned it off in about:config

Buttons840 2y ago
Without advertisements, the internet would only have content worth paying for and content people want to share for reasons other than financial gain. How awful (/s).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kelnos 2y ago
  That's the thing... people would still make free content, and since there wouldn't be as many shady ways to monetize, it would cut down on low-effort (and AI-generated) garbage. The internet would be such a better place. We would probably lose some good stuff, or see it moved behind paywalls. That would be a shame, but I think it would be worth it.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I doubt that it would cut down on the amount of low effort garbage. The high effort non-garbage stuff is produced by professionals who have the luxury of spending a full work week's amount of time improving their craft. writers writing free content with no business model can't do that unless they have a trust fund. which, I suppose they're out there, but I doubt the number of those that are writers.

3np 2y ago

Here is the actual script, if you prefer copy-pasting a one-liner over curl|sh... echo 'user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false);' | tee -a $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/$(grep "Default=.*\.default*" "$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/profiles.ini" | cut -d"=" -f2)/user.js

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Really sad to see Firefox’s direction but also not sure how they should be funded to avoid these things. I’m also not sure that the web can be made into something different unless web standards aren’t freed of influence by giants like Google

the_third_wave 2y ago
They should concentrate on developing the browser and get out of political activism entirely. Use the rather large amount of money they already have as an investment fund to finance a slimmed-down operation while also soliciting donations from users and some select companies. Ditch the large administrative staff they gained during the Baker years, swap some of them out for developers. They should not try to be a PAC, there's enough of those already.
- rnd0 2y ago
  Wouldn't this be a case where the iron law of bureaucracy applies? Meaning that the people who are already there and are invested in their 'mission' would resist any kind of reform of the organization because the primary task of any such organization is protecting itself from outsiders?
  - account42 2y ago
    Yes, but only because the Mozilla Foundation has the same problem. If it was just the corporation then the foundation could decide to replace it entirely.
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Is the corporation the piece that builds the browser?
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  [flagged]
2y ago

OutOfHere 2y ago

`dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled` already was false. If you're having to set it manually in `about:config`, you're likely missing something bigger in `about:preferences#privacy`.

kelnos 2y ago
Odd, it was 'true' for me, and I have all the privacy stuff in there set to the most private of settings. There was one section in there with an option labeled: > Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement Strangely, though, it was already unchecked, and at any rate, greyed out so I couldn't toggle it. Toggling that about:config value didn't change the state of that checkbox. I also found another about:config pref called "dom.origin-trials.private-attribution.state" (set to zero for me); I wonder if that has anything to do with it.
sn0wleppard 2y ago
Yeah, I'd already turned it from the standard settings page.
remram 2y ago
Do you know if there's a GUI setting that controls that on mobile?

jmakov 2y ago

Can this be also disabled on Android?

kelnos 2y ago
Sure, about:config works there as well. Interestingly, it was already disabled on my phone, but enabled on desktop.
- cma 2y ago
  Google likely pays them to disable about:config on Android or implies they won't pay them as much for default search and they read the tea leaves. https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-about-config/idi-p/8071 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/firefox-for-android-abo... It only works on the more insecure nightly version of firefox.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I just checked this config value on my Firefox Nightly and it's already preset to false. Interesting.
    - remram 2y ago
      Maybe you had turned it off last time this was on the front-page? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40974112 That's what I suspect for my own setting anyway.
  - kilburn 2y ago
    This is equivalent to about:config and works on the regular firefox mobile version too: chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
    - cma 2y ago
      Didn't work for me just now. When there have been ways in the past the non-nightly version wipes the changes each restart unless they are already exposed in settings I think.

kelnos 2y ago

This is absolutely disgusting. Despite Mozilla's general decline, I always want to believe they're going to do the right thing by their users. But this is really hard to swallow. Advertising is unethical psychological manipulation, full stop. I don't care if the delivery or targeting mechanism is supposedly "privacy-preserving" (yeah, right). Ads themselves, even completely untargeted ads, need to go.

roca 2y ago
Then I think it's only fair for you to completely stop using ad-supported sites and services, right away. (Which will also mean that Firefox's treatment of ads will not affect you.)
- bux93 2y ago
  What do you mean you don't want to sleep with me? It's a date! I paid for dinner! - advertisers
  - roca 2y ago
    It's actually: you say you want to live in a world where there are no ads, and therefore no ad-supported content. Well, with a little self-restraint you can live in that world right now. What, you don't like that world after all?
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    "It's not stealing, I'm just freely accessing your paid content" - users
    - nmeagent 2y ago
      "Officer, arrest this man! He had the gall to show up at my site and only consume some of the content I tried to shove into his face!"
    - anononaut 2y ago
      They can always refuse to serve me anything. That's equally fair.

account42 2y ago

curl | sh for THIS? Riiight, let's give that website permission to execute arbitrary code on your computer just to change a single FF preference? Really????

clemailacct1 2y ago
I think this is a bit of a sensational take. The code being executed is all there without obfuscation.
- account42 2y ago
  Not at all. The code that you see is not guaranteed the code that curl will receive. And even if you check the curl output, if you run it a second time to pipe to sh it might receive something different.

zczc 2y ago

More privacy-related about:config settings: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_about_config_privacy_tweeks https://wiki.mozilla.org/Privacy/Privacy_Task_Force/firefox_...

Hard_Space 2y ago
Please be aware that at least one of these settings will log you out of all your accounts (I suspect it may be the one related to fingerprinting, though I am not certain). If, as I am, you are signed into 10-20 essential accounts, including work accounts, it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state, even after you have reversed some of the settings outlined here. There are easier ways of getting a 'fresh start' for cookies and logins on Firefox than this. It has taken me an hour to undo some of the damage done by even timid experimentation with these settings. Sadly, this experiment logged me out of a YouTube-only Google account that I was able to make before Google closed the loophole that allowed you to make a YouTube-based account without the need for any email address or phone number. Re-authenticating at login for this account now requires that you supply an existing email address and phone number, so the utility of that particular account has gone forever.
- layer8 2y ago
  > it is going to be very difficult to get your browser back into its prior 'ready to use' startup, state Creating a backup before making any changes would solve that.
  - Hard_Space 2y ago
    Yes, my monthly profile backup would have been worth repeating before this experiment. If anyone knows how to make a 7Zip archive of a live and running Firefox profile, I would back up far more regularly - but Firefox's lock state foils the backup, meaning I have to close down Firefox to archive the profile.

SCdF 2y ago

I just want to use a robust, secure and decently fast browser that uses a different backend than Chrome to support the open web not ossifying into a single browser spec. I'll pay monthly! Please just let me pay for this in money and not my privacy :-(

trustno2 2y ago
There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux (there must be some...) GNOME Web/Epiphany (same thing) seems to use WebKit and is officially supported https://webkit.org/downloads/ https://webkit.org/downloads/ https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/ https://apps.gnome.org/Epiphany/ It seems there is no WebKit browser for Windows.
- sulandor 2y ago
  > There is Safari. Or whatever is based on WebKit on Linux webkit was forked from the kde browser, not the other way.
  - trustno2 2y ago
    So? Epiphany is based on WebKit now, KDE Browser doesn't exist anymore. (I needed to check it first.)
    - graemep 2y ago
      Its called Konqueror, and exists, but it uses a webkit fork now! Webkit was forked from KHTML which has been discontinued.
      - sulandor 2y ago
        i guess we are both right. thx for the clarification
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  No good adblocking for safari like in firefox though

Yodel0914 2y ago

I recently switched to LibreWolf[0] and, after tweaking a few settings that were more zealous that I'd like, it has been just as good as vanilla FF. 0: https://librewolf.net/ https://librewolf.net/

eitland 2y ago
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 checker (have forgotten the actual name), those kinds of things I know many people here say: "everyone say they will pay for this or that but nobody does", but I am one of those persons who actually do pay for software that changes my life for the better or has the potential to do so. So far I can only remember a single one (Logseq is good for now) in the last category that hasn't either collapsed in an honest way (rip sandstorm) or rewarded my early support by doing something really stupid, like typically breaking the thing that made me support them in the first place, but I guess I will continue trying. If someone makes the thing I mention above at a reasonable price and I don't show up, please contact me, I might have missed it. (Reasonable = don't expect me to pay the same for bundling a set of patches as I pay for Jetbrains bundle or MS Office.)
- michael9423 2y ago
  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 for your personal preferences. Just like you will probably say "Librewolf doesn't stay up to date the way I want them to... and they don't turn off all the stupid ideas the way I want them to." Librewolf is everything one can ask from an open-source Firefox fork. People always complained when Firefox moved to a more efficient extension system but practically no one cared about Waterfox keeping the old firefox extensions alive. That's because those people are the absolute minority and do not represent the common user. And what they complain about is not actually the technical change - it is about the overall change in society and what a move away from the more technical approach that allows user modification symbolizes - the dumbing down of software in general. For example, RSS symbolizes the old internet, but the old internet is gone.

willywanker 2y ago

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 extension support and the full customizability that went with it (including full support for full themes that can make it resemble Chrome or modern Firefox if you want to).

efilife 2y ago
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/palemoon 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
- willywanker 2y ago
  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 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.
luuurker 2y ago
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, does it make sense to use Pale Moon when you can tweak Firefox to be more private? In my case, I'm not sure.

Vinnl 2y ago

Here's the Firefox CTO explaining the motivation behind the experiment controlled by this setting, and the measures taken to ensure that it actually is private: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...

pacifika 2y ago
Yup making this change will result in a slower move away from the current worse situation, which is less private then the proposed Mozilla future, is my reading.
- thoroughburro 2y ago
  Because advertisers will voluntarily give up their other tracking tools? Does that sound likely?
red_trumpet 2y ago
He doesn't explain how it works though, or why it is private. Only that we should trust them.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  Incidentally this was published just now! https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2024/08/22/ppa-update/ He also linked to this technical explainer, though I don't think that's necessarily written for a broader audience: https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experiment https://github.com/mozilla/explainers/tree/main/ppa-experime...
  - incidentally 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - Vinnl 2y ago
    Oh, a flagged-dead throwaway comment pointed this out, but I guess it's fair to make explicit: I do work for Mozilla, but as an engineer, on an unrelated project. And I care about Mozilla and it's mission - so just sharing relevant links I came across on a personal title :)

cjpearson 2y ago

I really don't like advertising. I use uBlock Origin in my browser, AdGuard on my phone and pi-hole in my home. I even take a seam ripper to my clothes to make sure no logos remain. But I understand that advertising is the only viable business model for much of the internet. (Browsing HN and seeing that the top comment for every paywalled article is a pirated link confirms that.) If advertising must exist, I'd prefer it to be safe and private rather than the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today. Mozilla is working hard to make this happen and catching a lot of flak. It's notable that criticisms usually fall into three buckets. 1. It has "advertising" in the name, thus it is bad 2. Meta is involved, thus it is bad 3. Mozilla earns most of their revenue from Google, thus they are incapable of doing a good thing It would be much healthier if criticisms actually focused on the design and implementation of PPA. Perhaps things could be improved. Or maybe you have your own ideas for privacy preserving advertising. But it surprises me that even on a technical forum like HN, so many people endorse the awful advertising status quo. Yes, you can mostly opt out of advertising with uBlock Origin. You can still do that when PPA is enabled. The vast majority of browsers will continue to subsidize your browsing. What Mozilla is doing is working to provide the same level of privacy and security for the 90% of the population who does not use uBlock Origin. I think that's a noble goal.

perchlorate 2y ago
Advertisers are going to use it as just another data point, though. Why give them any more information than they already have? You know some of the best technical people we have waste their lives working for advertisers, and they _will_ find a way to extract more information from these technologies regardless of how supposedly private they are. I don't think there can be a technical solution to this problem unless advertisers are forced by government regulations to behave, with very heavy fines for non-compliance. I personally really hoped for Mozilla to take a strong stance against advertisers and introduce an aggressive ad blocker, but it was pretty obvious they're not going to do anything like that because of the conflict of interest (Google's money). Now we get another conflict of interest on top that makes it even less likely.
- roca 2y ago

kreyenborgi 2y ago

https://support.mozilla.org/no/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution 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)_/¯ ). ----- 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".)

remram 2y ago
Did you find a way on mobile, other than browsing to chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml and finding dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled?

yu3zhou4 2y ago

Author mentions this: https://web.archive.org/web/20181120211720/https://make-linux-fast-again.com/ 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?

perchlorate 2y ago
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.

red_admiral 2y ago

What I'd really like is to edit the file (sqlite database?) where my "ad topics" are stored. Just because I search for X once doesn't mean I want to see ads about it in future. Someone should write instructions for this for both firefox and chrome.

red_admiral 2y ago

From the CEO's comments on reddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_private_attribution_in_firefox/ https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_abo...): > we support people configuring their browser however they choose I rate this one as half true. If you leave firefox for a while and come back, it displays a bar with text like "Would you like to refresh your experience?" The first time I clicked that, it uninstalled my adblock extension. Not making that mistake again.

phendrenad2 2y ago
That was the moment I uninstalled FF and never went back. Truly icky behavior.
bravetraveler 2y ago
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
- takluyver 2y ago
  I think there's been some concern that people compare the speed of Firefox with a bunch of random extensions against Chrome with none. I wonder if the 'refresh' is an attempt to get away from that at the point where someone might be giving Firefox another chance. I don't remember if the refresh offer appeared back in the xul days, when there was much more scope for extensions to hurt the experience.
  - bjord 2y ago
    it is—it uninstalls all of your bloat the suggestion that its purpose is to trick people into uninstalling their adblocker is a ridiculous one

DavideNL 2y ago

Strange, apparently the setting (dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled) still hasn't been added to Arkenfox user.js ? I see it's mentioned and committed, but not in the latest release yet. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

pointlessone 2y ago

Why does this have to be curl | sh if there’s a checkbox in the settings for this specific setting? Do you value your privacy so much that you’re ready to run arbitrary script directly from internet?

prmoustache 2y ago
OTOH the script is 2 lines long and perfectly readable/understandable.
spinningslate 2y ago
The site covers all bases. The content of the script is shown on the landing page - and you have to visit it to see the instructions to run it. The comment also explains how to do it through through the configuration UI. That means you have 3 choices: * Use curl to run the script as directed * copy/paste the command line content, edit if desired, and run * follow the instructions to update through the UI.
- eloy 2y ago
  Author here, thanks! I just thought it was fun to make kind of a polyglot shell script-blog post :D "yeah but you could serve a different page with the curl UA" ok, then you just change about:config?
olejorgenb 2y ago
It annoys me that Firefox removed the ability to link directly to a setting in `about:config`. I'm almost certain this was possible before.

LordShredda 2y ago

It's disabled on Arch by default. Maybe choose an operating system that doesn't treat you like a product?

nonrandomstring 2y ago

Since my post critical of Mozilla is being rather savagely downvoted I'll just leave this here [0] [0] https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/ https://cybershow.uk/blog/posts/you-are-too-dumb-for-tech/

jqpabc123 2y ago

There is a form of advertising that doesn't invade your privacy and doesn't need metrics. It is called "context sensitive" advertising. This is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising related to pets. It's reasonable to assume you have an interest in pets; otherwise, you probably wouldn't be there. No metrics required. "Personalized advertising" is what happens when you go to a web site dedicated to pets and you see advertising for automobiles because you did some searching 3 weeks ago. What the "metrics" don't tell the advertiser is that he is wasting your time and his money because you already bought a car last week. "Personalized advertising" is just plain dumb. It is a way to waste your time and advertiser's money with a false sense of confidence that this is not the case. This explains why more than half the users on the internet are now taking active measures to block this annoying stupidity. And Google is actively trying to counter this trend. The only question left to answer is at what point will advertisers wake up and smell the coffee and realize a different, more privacy respecting approach might be just as effective for the same or maybe even less money?

brezelgoring 2y ago
Personalized advertisements exist because all-sites exist. Facebook isn’t a pets/cars/vexillology site, it’s an all-site; it and its kin are designed to contain almost all of humanity’s interests. It stands to reason that all manner of ads would fit in there, and in order to make these ads useful you need to filter or target them. If you see the history of targeted advertising, a case could be made that Facebook invented it as we know it today. No diss meant to Google and Googlers that might read this, I’m sure they played a big role as well.
- rcxdude 2y ago
  All-sites still have a context in which their ads appear. You are looking at some content on their site, so thy can advertise in the context of that content.
kmeisthax 2y ago
Personalized advertising has one key property that is very useful to this generation of Internet companies: it moves the ad dollars away from websites selling ads (aka "publishers") and to the networks (Google/Facebook). If you're, say, the NYT, you can sell ads, of course. But anyone who wants to buy ads on NYT can instead buy ads on other websites that only target NYT readers. Which are much cheaper. This is why news organizations all went paywall a decade ago. When you had to buy ads on a website to advertise to that website's audience, news was rolling in money. That's why they gave everything away for free, it'd be really dumb not to. But then Google and Facebook pirated[0] their audience, meaning all that free website traffic from the search engines is completely meaningless and provides no revenue. [0] Piracy as in "stole our lunch money", not piracy as in copyright infringement. We're making a moral judgment, not a legal one.

kuon 2y ago

Do you know the list of domain we can block to do this at the firewall level? I already block firefox.com and mozilla.org (developer.mozilla.org is exception for MDN).

clcaev 2y ago

Perhaps we could have a search engine that indexes only pages free of advertising?

horsawlarway 2y ago

Ditch Mozilla. Full stop. They are hand-in-hand with Google - Bought and paid for.

baliex 2y ago
Where do you propose we go instead?
- horsawlarway 2y ago
  Personally - I use ungoogled-chromium, librewolf, and ladybird. The first two are still fairly dependent on the upstream companies - but at least they're ripping out the junk - They are pragmatic solutions in the short term. Ladybird is nicely independent in the sense that's truly one of the few offerings that isn't a derivative of Firefox/Chromium, but it's not "ready" yet for most daily uses. But seriously - please don't fall for the Mozilla marketing that Firefox is some privacy beacon as an alternative to Chrome. It's marketing not reality.

m878m78 2y ago

[dead]

modzu 2y ago

mozilla going all in on advertising as a hedge against losing their google funding? it is sad. i support brave, but if brave went away whats left? did we lose?

leotravis10 2y ago

You have to make even more steps to make it somewhat more private although keep in mind, it's not for everyone: https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefully.html#tweaking-firefox https://unixdigest.com/articles/choose-your-browser-carefull... Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30043918

robaxisal 2y ago

when will people learn that piping scrips from internet to sh, is very insecure.... # curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh sigh

dinozarw 2y ago

# How to use: # curl https://make-firefox-private-again.com | sh Can we please stop telling people to pipe curl into sh?

oriettaxx 2y ago

I can't wait to have Kagi/Orion browser available in my laptop (already in my iphone, SUPER!)