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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it anti-net-neutrality? Is it ok to build it into a major browser? I actually block all the tracking, malware, ads, social networks, fraud, gambling, porn (except a couple of porn sites I like :-)) etc domains I could find information about but this is my personal conscious choice, I have manually installed extensions for this and built the lists. Shouldn't other people do the same themselves too if they choose to or leave everything as is if they don't actually feel they need to change anything?

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For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to. Their brand is that the browser is on your side, I'm happy to have the defaults set accordingly.

(Edit: I should add that I think you're asking a very valid philosophical question that my opinion as a user of Firefox doesn't fully address)

From the practical point of view, I am afraid the trackers will respond a way if such a move is made on such a global level. Nobody was fighting AdBlock+ when it was only used by geeks and now as is it has gained so much attention there are a lot of sites that won't work if you use AdBlock+. Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it.

> Introducing te "do-not-track" header was a great idea but it has been completely ruined by major browsers turning it on by default so the trackers have legitimately chosen to ignore it.

This seems to imply that doNotTrack would have been successful for its intended purpose had it not been a default setting at one point, which feels like wishful thinking.

Sure, that aspect made it impractical for uncharacteristically privacy-minded companies in the space to support the header, but the vast majority of companies in the business of tracking and advertising would have ignored it anyways, because there's zero consequence for not doing so.

Sites that do not work when using AdBlock+ are fighting back their money extorsion scheme (Adblock+ has this commericla program where if you pay them money they will whitelist your ads). Geeks ahve long moved to ublock origins or umatrix.

Anyways 95% of the time you just have to disable scripts from the websites to unbreak them.

do not track was never a good idea as respecting it was on a voluntary basis, meaning it was mostly an additional metrics to use to track and profile people who do not want to be tracked. It's a no brainer really that if you did not want to be tracked you should not enable it. Remember ghostery ? same thing all over again.

> For me, using Firefox is the personal conscious choice you refer to.

Firefox marketing is effective but to be clear they have begun changing direction, pursuing a more practical "attracting the masses" approach (a la Signal) rather than paranoid/hyper-vigilant/engineer-style idealism (something some misinterpret Firefox marketing as still claiming), and as a result Firefox has been forced to course-correct several times due to public outcry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144

A recent eye-opener for me personally was discovering telemetry's switch from opt-in to opt-out as of September.

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#firefox-by-de... (3 months ago) vs. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Telemetry/FAQ#Is_Telemetry_enabled_... (3 years ago)

I would not be surprised if the move to opt-out spying is consequences of the dropping ALSA and adding a hard dependency to pulseaudio fiasco.

Telemetry has been held as one of the main justification for the change as it supposedly showed only a fraction of users used ALSA. It turned out to be a combination of misinterpretation of collected data (installed libpulse does not mean not using ALSA) and a complete ignorance of the real world (most linux distros disable telemetry because privacy, people using ALSA are often the same that take extra measures to protect their privacy hence disabling mozilla spying mechanisms).

As a consequence mozilla pushed hard for package maintainers to enable telemetry in linux distros and sadly most did, see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1233687 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285195 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1285201 http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/firefox.git/commit/?...

Compare to this from 7 years ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=667577

The fun part was when mozilla people started patronizing users for protecting their privacy and told them that it's their fault if ALSA got dropped and that they should relinquish their privacy instead or they will be ignored:

  Second, continuing to opt out of telemetry will just make problems
  like this worse. As was stated in this thread, one of the
  justifications for removing ALSA support was that the telemetry
  numbers showed a very little ALSA usage. If more ALSA users had
  telemetry enabled, perhaps the outcome would have been different.


  In any case, running without telemetry means not having a say in
  data-driven decisions about what configurations Mozilla should
  support. It's OK to disable telemetry (that's why it's
  user-controllable), but both users and distros that make decisions on
  users' behalf should to take into account that if don't let Firefox
  send info about your system config to Mozilla, your system config is
  invisible to Mozilla's decision making about what to support.

source: Rationalising Linux audio backend support - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.platform/j...

There was no course correction here, ALSA is still out despite the issue being entirely to mozilla implementation and not ALSA abilities, despite this being an edge case for linux netflix users with a specific 5.1 setup and despite someone coming forward to offer to fix and maintain their broken code.

Did I mention that they failed to mention this change in release notes, that firefox displayed a message inviting people to click a link to learn why their browser suddenly lost the ability to play sound but the link was broken and that this was an ESR release?

So when I read some mozilla marketing PR about them pretending to champion user privacy, I'm nonplussed at best.

When I said course-correct I didn't mean complete reversal, it's usually been just enough to satiate temporary outrage in early-adopter/tech circles before it goes mainstream.

Thanks for taking the time to document the details of this particular situation which I've never heard about before. I wonder how many other mildly upsetting (?? - per "nonplussed at best") decisions are currently accumulating under the radar. Each time another pops up I'm amazed at how much Mozilla has successfully swept under the rug.

The two I knew of are including Paper by default for some time (after taking heat for this, then acquiring it a year later... though I didn't see it when I just checked) and sticking with opt-_out_ for Google Analytics on the add-ins page. After digging recently thanks to the Mr. Robot stuff I discovered the opt-out Cliqz add-on for Germany and now your anecdote.

Branding and marketing and PR are just that, and the objective is to get a bigger market share.

Actually it is to be the dominant browser on the market, mozilla name means mosaic killer, as in dethrone NCSA Mosaic and take its place as the n°1 browser by market share and was the internal name for netscape.

They kept the name for the continuation of the effort though the target had moved to IE who actually took over Mosaic. Now the target is google chrome and the historical meaning is lost on most people but the intent is still to have the bigger market share because monies.

I think you're conflating not shaping traffic at the ISP or Backbone level with something else. The something else in this case is making requests to URLs a consumer of a page may or may not be vetting. If anything it's not treating all contents of a page as equal, and I think that's okay. We already do this with prefetching hints, ordering elements on a page (e.g. styling before scripting), and sometimes consumer driven more invasive approaches (ad blocking, monkey patching sites -- e.g. Reddit Enhancement Suite, etc.). Sure this is pretty heavy handed, but it's quite likely that the other vendors will follow suit (though perhaps with different priority, I doubt Google would do this to their own services).

I mean, not any more than certain kinds of code being faster than others in browsers. There's tons of stuff out there on how to optimize your site for browsers, and browsers make conscious decisions on what kind of code will be faster all the time.

Also I think tracking protection is off by default except in private browsing mode, and if it's something you need to explicitly enable that's no different from the "neutrality" issues caused by installing an adblocker (there are no issues).

This also ties into the whole concept of "a browser is a user agent" (http://words.steveklabnik.com/user-agent-moz-a), i.e. it advocates for you. Here it's trying to get the actual content loaded faster. ISPs are not user agents, they are more like a utility.

> Shouldn't other people do the same themselves too if they choose to or leave everything as is if they don't actually feel they need to change anything?

Your browser is no longer imposed on you, so switching to Firefox IS doing that thing yourself.

This is a good question. I’d say it is not net-neutrality related as it doesn’t influence the “pipes.”

On the other hand, if it silently influences internet traffic, it does in a way censor content and could influence their bottom line.

I would expect this to be an explicit switch.

Edit: clarity

Client software can be chosen by the user. Net neutrality is about protecting the user's choice to use the network how they wish. Choosing which piece of software to use is a part of that. In addition - unlike ISPs - browser vendors are not a natural monopoly, and there is established case law preventing it, so it's not about net neutrality, just anti-trust.

I support this view because many will have justifications to explain : "well, since it's not FF, then well, it's ok, you know, not exactly like the hardware pipes...".

But on the principle, yep, FF shouldn't have a neutral treatment for everything. And that, of course, is impossible to define : what is "neutral" ?

That was my thought: should browsers be content gatekeepers?

(Honest question, this is a very tricky area)

If Comcast decides to "block" 3rd party tracking and analytics content, would it be ok?

network neutrality refers to network providers being neutral to the data they transmit. applications running over the network can do as they please.

by this argument ad-blockers violate net-neutrality.

> network neutrality refers to network providers being neutral to the data they transmit. applications running over the network can do as they please.

Not exactly, network neutrality can mean almost anything. The way it is discussed in the FCC regards ISPs, but you can expand it to anything.

> by this argument ad-blockers violate net-neutrality.

No. And ad-blocker isn't any different from a child filter. It is a tool specifically designed to block certain content explicitly enabled by the user.

And to expand: by your logic, it would be ok then for Chrome to block all links to Firefox?

Or for Microsoft to block all links to other browsers?

> And to expand: by your logic, it would be ok then for Chrome to block all links to Firefox?

No, that wouldn't be OK. But not everything that is not OK is a network neutrality violation.

> No, that wouldn't be OK. But not everything that is not OK is a network neutrality violation.

If you consider browsers an integral part of the internet infrastructure, it is. If not, it isn't. Happy to discuss naming, but it will mostly be useless.

But glad that you agree that Firefox preemptively delaying those sites is not OK.

>But glad that you agree that Firefox preemptively delaying those sites is not OK.

that kind of snarky comment is not helpful

> If you consider browsers an integral part of the internet infrastructure, it is. If not, it isn't.

No, it simply doesn't have anything to do with whether it is internet infrastructure. Prioritizing stuff according to the user's wishes/under the user's control without price discrimination is not a neutrality violation, even when network operators do it.

> But glad that you agree that Firefox preemptively delaying those sites is not OK.

Idiot.

i mean if you want to redefine network neutrality you are welcome to do so. I'm not sure what the definition you are using is or where it comes from.

i think your definition muddies the waters. if firefox shipped with a built-in default-on child filter would that be a net neutrality violation in your eyes? if it just slowed down adult content would it violate net neutrality? where even is the line here and is the line meaningful?

> if firefox shipped with a built-in default-on child filter would that be a net neutrality violation in your eyes? if it just slowed down adult content would it violate net neutrality? where even is the line here and is the line meaningful?

I don't know (that's why I'm asking). On one side, you could argue that they are providing a service to users, on the other hand, they become a content gatekeeper if they do it by default.

Chrome, for example, blocks suspicious sites, but that's a very clear line you're drawing. With ads and tracking, it becomes muddled.

It would be similar to adult content in the UK, where AFAIK you have to proactively enable it through your ISP, it comes blocked by default.

ok then I suggest you go back and write a clearly usable definition before trying to apply that definition to "net neutrality." or else make up a new term

it's hard enough to get the public to understand this concept without also waffling over the meaning in the tech community.

Only if ad-blocker are set up by a third party such as your ISP. Anything run by the end user for her own use is not net neutrality.

yes that is my point

Does Google count as a 3rd party? It is launching a default-on ad-blocking service on Chrome.

it's not a third party when it's the same person that made the browser. it's the same second party whose software you opted to use. there's no net neutrality issue here.

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