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Comment by feross | Hacker News Reader

Wait until Jeff hears about Service Workers. :)

I hadn't heard of Service workers until now. I'm fairly privacy conscious and it's become such a hassle trying to keep up with these measures. It seems every other month there is a new feature I need to know to disable in Firefox. I'm so tired of it. How does one keep track of all this without having to be a professional web dev?

I would suspect you'd have to keep up with the browser developer's pages as well as several security blogs. AKA just about impossible.

>How does one keep track of all this without having to be a professional web dev?

I've got some bad news here.

That was my immediate impression as to what was going on. This guy doesn't know about service workers...

For the uninitiated:

1) uMatrix can block these.

2) about:serviceworkers lets you manage/remove individual ones.

3) about:config key dom.serviceWorkers.enabled lets you disable the whole thing altogether.

edit: fixed #3

thank you, I learned about service worker lately while doing some web development(not my usual cup of tea) and I backed off and used a rss feed instead because I found modern web too intrusive/google centric. Just disabled service worker in my firefox (+no script)

Thanks for "about:serviceworkers", found around 30.

What's the deal with service workers? I read up on them and do not see how they keep connections open when the page is closed.

Service workers run in the background independent of any website pages open.

So your computer can get slower without the hassle of you having to actually install anything!

They do not, though. Chrome terminates any idle (or too-busy) service workers after some time.

ublock can inject this to every opened page before js starts running

    delete Object.getPrototypeOf(window.navigator).serviceWorker
    delete window.ServiceWorker
    delete window.ServiceWorkerRegistration
    delete window.ServiceWorkerContainer

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