Why doesn‘t Firefox block all 3rd party cookies by default? That would be a huge win for privacy. Yes, some sites would break. But if Apple can do it with Safari, Mozilla can do it with Firefox.
Be brave! Do it!
Vista's added security measures like UAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control) broke a lot of poorly coded Windows applications that didn't bother to follow the rules of the platform.
Who did the users blame when those apps broke? Microsoft.
Why? "It worked fine until I upgraded to Vista!"
Sigh.
I think they did improve the UAC situation with Vista SP1, if memory serves.
https://www.networkworld.com/article/2253987/microsoft--neut...
I seem to recall Vista was way more sluggish than 7 on the same machines.
But then again I guess i'm not an average user.
The surveillance internet is something that was allowed to evolve by a lack of foresight from the standard authors in their desire to build a rich web. We should put an end to it as soon as possible. The browser should not leak unique identifiers in any situation and all standard browsers should be as finger-print resistant as the Tor Browser.
In my view, if you leak data that is critical to the privacy of the user, it's as bad if not worse than an improper implementation of TLS. It takes only two, modestly skilled, collaborating webadmins (one site "shameful" and one used with authentication) to possibly destroy a person's life, reputation and family. A practical attack on SSL2.0 is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Let's put responsibility for privacy back where it should be: on the browsers and web standard authors.
<iframe src="https://saasapp.com/report?url=
https://mydomain.com/data/1234.json%3F
v%3D42%26auth%3D__79_Pv6-fj39vX08_Lx8A++"/>
[Whitelist INC saasapp.com From mydomain.com]
[Blacklist saasapp.com]
[Allow once]
[Ignore]
So from that perspective, how is ad-tech a problem for privacy?
Or they would just not support Firefox.
Sadly, I think the moment has passed for Mozilla to make moves like this. They don't have enough marketshare.
Safari has enough market share that web developers must work within Apple's guidelines if they want their websites to work on iOS.
On a desktop, if Firefox breaks, people will just switch to Chrome or something else. Plenty of people want things to "just work" out of the box.
Maybe the better solution is to have a guided install process. When installing firefox, ask the user if they want it to "just work" or be "privacy conscious"? Warn them of the tradeoffs of both and let them decide once.
I suspect we're just training people to click the Whatever button. As that's most “normal” people's response (I am not normal), the courts will eventually rule that a first-use roadblock doesn't produce informed consent, so doesn't excuse you under the GDPR. Hopefully, then, websites will stop performing a superficial impression of caring about privacy.
(Explicit informed consent is the GDPR's last-resort excuse, which you only need if your use of personal data falls outside all of the GDPR's automatically-acceptable justifications for using and storing personal data.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-04/firefox-f...
Personally I always hoped they would simply copy Privacy Badger and develop an algorithm, instead of relying on a black list.