Firefox updates its iOS web browser to turn Tracking Protection on by default
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The law you’re referring to is “using a monopoly in one area to gain an advantage in another.” Crucial word being: monopoly. iOS is not a monopoly in the mobile market. Windows had 300 000% of the market, iOS has around… 20% worldwide? Let’s be generous and double it to 40%: still a far cry from a monopoly.
Whether iOS is a legal monopoly does not depend on market share in a common descriptive market segment, but instead in whether it in fact has market (pricing) power; that is, an antitrust market is in effect defined by where substitution actually occurs with price changes, not on how media/analysts describe markets based on product characteristics.
Didn’t know this, though. It makes a lot of sense, in fact.
Maybe. Market / pricing power is not sinple to assess, and I'm not sure if device / OS side or the application distribution side is most relevant to the browser bundling decision. I'd say it' seems to me more likely that the Apple has pricing power in the App Store that in iOS devices (it doesn't sell iOS as such, so that's probably not the thing to look at), and either device or app store market power, if it exists, could be leveraged against competing browsers with the policies restricting them.)
If you click on a web app and tip the creator $5 or buy the pro version unlock / etc, they don't get to siphon any of your money away from the content creator like they do on their App Store. THIS is why they block 3rd party browser engines (along with console / arcade emulators, Amazon / HumbleBundle app stores / etc). Anything that competes with their app store is bad.
If you don't like it, vote with your wallet and come on over to Android (like 8.8/10 phones sold today)!
[1] https://webkit.org/blog/7675/intelligent-tracking-prevention...
I want to know how it compares to the EasyPrivacy list.
Any plans for desktop though...? After all, desktop seems to be the main platform for Mozilla.
May have to check out how FF compares
It gives web developers time to notice issues with their websites/webapps and fix/report them.
Per the roadmap at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Roadmap, we're explicitly working toward making Firefox more opinionated in 2018. Specifically, "Firefox will take a stand against tracking," will "filter certain types of ads by default," and will "block ad re-targeting."
Mozilla can't do the same with Firefox, because they don't have anything to hide under. They rely on webpage owners making money off of Firefox, otherwise they're not going to build/test against Firefox.
Mozilla can be Brave with Firefox for iOS, and with Firefox Focus as well, because there they don't use Gecko as layout engine, they hide underneath someone else's layout engine. (Apple forces other browsers to use WebKit on iOS; Firefox Focus for Android uses Android Webview because it keeps the binary small, which is important as it's sort of meant to be a secondary browser.)
So, they're most definitely not doing the same for desktop and Android Firefox. It would kill Firefox/Gecko in no time, if they did that. It wouldn't be brave, it'd be suicide.
Now I don't know about possibility of implementing browser plugins. I guess that it should be possible, but API would be different from other platforms.
I hope that there are other things that make a product unique. Like features or defaults or what it looks like.
Apps like Feedly, or Firefox, will have to do additional work to include _their own_ content blocking.
Firefox doesn't use SFSafariViewController. It uses the WKWebView (?). The WKWebView gives the hosting app a lot more control over the webview and whatever you do in the webview is accessible to the hosting app. Cookies, bookmarks, etc. are not available to the hosting app.
I know what Firefox for iOS uses.
I've heard the argument against setting the DNT field by default (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track#Internet_Explorer...) so I'm wondering if there are any similar arguments in this case. Presumably Tracking Protection doesn't rely on the honor system, but might being a default spurn the development of countermeasures to circumvent it?
You can use the same arguments that support the census. Corporations need good data to know where to invest.
> might being a default spurn the development of countermeasures to circumvent it?
Certainly. This is an endless arms race.
The specifics of how Firefox has implemented this feature are fairly conservative so that's less likely, but I think you need to be really careful about blocking certain lists of domains by default.
But these are way more expensive and involved for hosts than "put this one script tag on each page".
Lets say I run a website lets say youtube.com or whatever.
I want to serve ads. I have to go to a marketplace like double click where advertisers bid for ads. In an ideal world, the client web browser will never talk to double click. When I serve a website, I will also serve the advertising myself from my own web servers using just html and css (no javascript). We can do a lot of flashy things using css animations so it shouldn't be a problem. If I really want my users to go away, maybe I can even serve video ads. I will simply get the ads from the marketplace and tell them I served an ad. However, reality is not that simple. If they let me do that, then I will have strong incentives to just lie. I probably won't do it for a while but after a bit the temptation to lie just becomes too great. Of course, I had twenty trillion page views yesterday. Why not? I am not saying youtube.com lies (and it would be trivial for Google to check if they did because they own YouTube). I am confident Google is probably the most upstanding member of the prominent players in the ad game. However, how can an advertiser trust some random website? I don't think advertisers will trust them.
I think we can get rid of a lot of problems in advertising by simply prohibiting any kind of javascript in advertisements. I don't know how though. https://static.doubleclick.net/instream/ad_status.js for example take a look at a more benign website https://i.imgur.com/KS3gjMV.png and compare it to this website https://news.ycombinator.com what if we could get rid of all the calls to third party servers?
Thoughts?
(Maybe this would make blocking ads easier now that I think about it.)
Everyone in the advertising value chain has a financial incentive to run their own metrics. Nobody trusts anyone else’s metrics; and publishers will overstate viewership and advertisers will understate impressions. Nobody can even agree on a standard set of metrics for measuring the success of an ad.
That’s why all sorts of JavaScript tracking and analytics get included in online media properties. It’s called the “measurement problem” and it is far from a new problem in media. It’s one of those rare situations where incentives are so opposed that both parties have no reason to pretend they’re not screwing the other.
Edit: also, every decently large publisher will have its own ad standards as to what you can and cannot include, sizing, etc. usually you just work with an ad buyer and a creative firm to identify publishers to target, what keywords to aim for and design the ads for the format at each publisher. And most serious publishers will only serve ads hosted directly on their servers or a set of approved CDNs/DSPs.
Edit2: also there are mature formats for this stuff already like VAST, etc. they all include JavaScript and flash.
If the ads are hosted on my own servers, all is good.
I don't know YouTube or how its leadership thinks about these things but if I were in charge, I would go bankrupt before I allowed WPP to insert their arbitrary code on YouTube website and apps.
Point is that we have to put our foot on the ground and tell advertisers that they have to trust us. If that means publishers get paid less per "impression", I would be ok with it. This just seems like common sense to me because advertisers had to simply trust publishers when it came to print journalism. I think we need something to level the playing field so advertisers cannot compel publishers (or exchanges if we can sort of merge the publisher and the exchange) to give up their crown jewels.
But it should still very much lower the amount of tracking, as it requires a lot more effort than adding something like Google Analytics to your page. And there's got to be a huge number of pages out there, which don't actually have a real use for analytics. They just included analytics, because it required no more than five clicks to do so and made some pretty graphs appear.
If there is something specific you would like to see exposed in about:config that is currently not available in settings, let us know.
I love Firefox - it’s my default desktop browser for many years. The about:config settings gives you that old Amiga feeling (like Netscape also had) where you can configure a system to your liking. I change/review/edit some advanced settings for new installs. Nerdy? Yes!