Firefox Private Browsing mode upgrade
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
> “‘Independent Voices’ are the voices of the past and present that create a better future,” said Keely Alexis. “I chose this [analogy] as my inspiration for the collaboration because it feels authentic to me but it also aligns with Firefox and the vision that we can make the world better, on the internet and beyond.”
Jesus, can you just say "we've got themes?" No one is going to remember Firefox as the next MLK Jr because they let you turn the window chrome orange.
It's so stupid and confusing and baffling that I want to rage quit Firefox with this as the absolute last straw. Like wtf, you're gonna take back my color in a few months? Just pull the upsell for it? Why the hell am I having to wonder about any of this? Why on God's green earth was this done instead of spending any effort getting a SINGLE bit of unity among the Bookmarks, Downloads and Add-ons panels, all of which should behave at least rougly similarly. (Because, to be clear, I had a Firefox theme that was imperceptibly similar to this months ago before this Colorways upsell)
I don't get it. I do not do not do not get it. And now they're screwing around with another extensions menu that takes space on the toolbar but doesn't de-dupe with the extension buttons themselves (I actually can see where this Might be going, but again, zero clear comms about it).
I'm the poster boy for an annoying Firefox advocate and I'm increasingly looking at selling my laptop to build a woodworking shed because it all feels hopeless.
You are not alone. I'm starting to think something is wrong with me because I don't give an iota of a damn about any of this. I have watched people just get sucked into the rabbit hole of browsing for themes for the their browser while accomplishing exactly nothing after being overwhelmed and paralyzed by the choices. (Kinda like trying to find something to watch on streaming platforms)
Me, I have the default desktops from the OS, mobile OS, etc. I have too many windows covering my desktop to even care what it looks like. Yes, that's me, and I'm not even close to being everyone else. If this is the thing that convinces people to stop using Chrome, then fine. Spend time making the UI customizable to the point it looks like a MySpace background because that's what 99.9999% of people not me want. I'll do me, you do you.
Given that a huge number of Chrome users probably come from societies that actively despise this kind of stuff, it might actually backfire.
Lucky for them I guess most people outside of HN probably never even read that marketing material, so I think it's more of a circle jerk for the marketing dpt.
I'm pretty sure Chrome is the most common browser on the planet because Google abused its market position in search and mobile (Android) to shove it down people's throats, helped along by bundling it with other installers. Everything else was secondary.
Mozilla has hundreds of millions of dollars at minimum, very likely billions. It's absurd that they're failing so miserably, and it's obscene that their CEO has taken increasingly large 8 figure bonuses while the company has floundered under her leadership.
Self respect?
That may have helped but chrome really was a great browser.
I don't use chrome and haven't done so outside of work for over a decade.
And Firefox has always had themes. Real themes. Colorways is just some coloring and it's not even staying around for these supposed mainstream users to enjoy
When done in the physical world this is called decorating, I guess theming is just a digital version of hanging a print from Ikea on the wall. When I do this sort of thing, I usually do accomplish something, because I like looking at pretty things, doing so makes me happier, making my things prettier helps me feel a bit happier when I look at them. Whether that has value depends on perspective, though I feel if it doesn't then that perspective is a pretty dismal one. It's also a way to make an abstract and alien thing feel a bit more familiar and "one's own", and computers are plenty alien and intimidating for a lot of people.
They don't understand people love Firefox because it's not Chrome. Not because it's not Chrome enough.
One thing I'd actually like is a reasonably powerful history browser/manager. I want to look for websites I visited in a custom time period, how many times I visited a website last month, or in January, or whatever.
It's all very poor as it stands: a very simple interface with no power-features whatsover, a fixed set of time periods to view (today, yesterday, last month), and a simple total visit count and timestamp of most recent visit.
But the vast vast vast majority of people want to interact with (places in Firefox lingo) bookmarks, history and downloads from the browser instead of closing the browser and open a deeply nested file in a database manager app and write SQL queries to get the data they want.
Yes, the marketing behind it is stupid because it attempts to correlate some deeper symbolic meaning to the act of choosing colors for your web browser. But as a fellow Firefox advocate, I would rather Mozilla plays around with these sort of corny marketing concepts as a way of gaining market share rather than rely on Google's patronage ad-infinitum.
It feels to me like they just ran out of either the will or the engineers to do the hard innovative stuff and are just trying to turn Firefox into their own UX art project at this point.
To play devil's advocate, that may well be exactly what they're doing. I've always used Firefox, but I'm aware that I'm not a typical user andmy interests likely don't align with mass adaoption.
I've said it before when Firefox has released new features that the HN crowd aren't interested in - there's not enough of you (us) for your opinions on [ themes ] to matter. And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.
I don't have access to statistics to qualify whether or not this is the case and contribute to making it harder to evaluate by turning off telemetry and never using Google ads, so I can't exactly complain.
Yes you can complain. They should be well aware that their remaining userbase is very averse to telemetry.
If anything the companies going all-in on telemetry and A-B testing are making ever worse products. Like Microsoft with their Teams that gets slower and more confusing every month.
> And if this is a quicker way to grow adoption then it's a good thing in the long term.
What growth? I only see a decline. All they succeed at is alienating the users that were still using it. Not gaining new ones.
I just don't get the point. Have a feature or not. But not this temporary stuff. I suppose they think doing a "killed by Google" will make them as popular as chrome again :)
Also for a long while one of my preferred FTP programs was just a Firefox extension.
Yes, I think Google must be punished harsher for Chrome than Microsoft was for IE, but Mozilla couldn't have done much more to eradicate their market share without losing plausible deniability ;-)
Meanwhile Firefox Android is still a slow, unstable garbage pile. How many years now since Mozilla began developing exclusively for headline writers instead of their users?
I used to have much more minor issues that are somewhat similar to what you describe, but they've been fixed for the last year or so. (I run Nightly all the time, on Linux, and generally have remarkably few issues with it.)
Still, I won't browse the web without uBlock Origin, so Firefox is here to stay.
Hooli is about people. Hooli is about innovative technology that makes a difference, transforming the world as we know it. Making the world a better place, through minimal message oriented transport layers.
Classic example (pdf warning) :
https://www.goldennumber.net/wp-content/uploads/pepsi-arnell...
That PDF cost Pepsi millions of dollars.
Even posts I should be professionally partial to, like those about UI design, rub me of the wrong way. It's often full of "creating delightful experiences" and "streamlining a seamless flow".
> I observed the change in tone in Mozilla blog posts, from experts talking about their craft to marketspeak.
I think I can explain what you're seeing here. The original blog.mozilla.org was run very much like the old "MSDN blogs" from Microsoft (think Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing.)
When I started at Mozilla a decade ago, my manager told me to file a request for my own space on blogs.mozilla.org -- which was denied. I was told that this was because blog.mozilla.org was being refocused as the "official" Mozilla blog.
People who already had accounts on there were grandfathered in, which is why some people (Nick Nethercote's blog come to mind) still had blogs on there. Obviously as those developers moved on, those employee blogs have gradually died off.
These days, if you want technical content, you'll need to look at hacks.mozilla.org for "officially sanctioned" pieces, or look at the blogs that publish to planet.mozilla.org for developer blogs (though much like blogging in general, there is much less traffic on there compared to a decade ago).
TL;DR: The focus of blog.mozilla.org is primarily corporate and marketing at this point.
Nothing recent comes close to that, even Linux desktops make it hard to choose colors or how visible your scrollbars are if you prefer to actually see and use scrollbars (sometimes you can edit CSS files that get overwritten again each time you update your system).
The CSS comment sounds like Gnome. I used Gnome for fifteen years and got tired of what you're complaining about and switched to KDE eight or nine months ago and haven't looked back
I really love that about KDE, the configurability.
Why am I seeing people using the word "joy" everywhere lately? And why is theming a web browser bringing it to anyone?
https://blog.mozilla.org/community/files/2013/05/2002_phoeni...
Even if it were inferior in any aspect to other options, I'd still use it for the above mentioned reasons.
But Firefox is mostly independent eh? Did they stop taking google money yet?
Firefox is the only even vaguely independent browser engine that keeps up at all with google.
I use it these days and I am considering to start chipping in too (I am at my limits currently so I will have to stop something else though).
But I really really want something like my old Firefox back...!
Well yeah, that's how all the forks are when they start out. It's less than a year old (started in Nov 2021) so I'd be worried if it didn't keep up with upstream security patches.
AFAIK Librefox re-forks from the newest FF everytime there is a release and apply their fixes as patches.
Did something change? Last I checked almost all funding for Firefox was from Google.
> More than 90 per cent of Mozilla's funding comes from web search providers that pay for the right to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions. According to the organization's latest financial figures [PDF], $430m of its 2018 total revenue of $451m came from those internet giants – primarily Google, we understand. These deals were due to be renewed or renegotiated by November this year.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...
I believe it's listed under royalties and also receivables in the annual report, though that does not specify Google specifically, but you can look at the numbers and figure they are a large portion if the news was accurate.
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2020/mozilla-fdn-202...
Firefox is losing userbase a lot faster than some other browsers are gaining it, is that Firefox users' fault or Firefox's?
I use Firefox because I think the sync service it provides is great and that some of the customization is unmatched, not because I think I'm some soldier fighting the Chromium monopoly.
Don't underestimate the power of small contributions. You could say the same about people using konqueror 20 years ago, it brought KHTML which brought us webkit. You could say the same about people using firefox at the same time. You could say the same about people using linux in middle 90's, the same about GCC... I could go on showing more examples.
Simply using a software is a form of contribution: at the least it improves statistics. People making small contributions are important; small donations to wikipedia, bug reports, translations, fixing a small bug, improving a feature you need, talking with devs to guarantee a device works... I personally made many of these small contributions and although most of them didn't ended up on the "market leader project", it certainly made them good enough for people to keep using them and to encourage other people to contribute too.
The fact that Firefox got backdrop-blur support in mid 2022 speaks volumes about Firefox's priorities.
I get the point you're trying to make, I use FOSS because I believe more people should be using it and if I don't, who would? But that doesn't work when it comes to Firefox. There are a lot of good free and open source browsers right now, no matter what engine they use.
If a chromium based FOSS browser gets popular enough, there are better chances of it surviving and breaking away from Google's monopoly at the same time. It does not matter what Google does with Chrome, as long as independent forks are able to exist within that same space and can get just as big.
Perhaps it speaks more to your priorities? I can't see anyone outside of a web developer who needed that feature 1 time or even caring that backdrop-blur wasn't implemented.
The fact that you're salty about a specific CSS property and that it's reason enough to boycott a browser speaks volumes.
The point is, if Firefox can't even make basic web features like blur work on the browser (that are available on even no name mobile browsers) I can't expect Firefox to ever surpass Chrome or other competitors and it's evident.
> The fact that you're salty about a specific CSS property and that it's reason enough to boycott a browser speaks volumes.
As a web developer, I 100% stopped development on Firefox because it doesn't support even the most basic features all other browsers have. Like it or not, it's an inferior product because of the missing web APIs.
You know what's better than fighting monopoly with an ideology? Fighting monopoly with an even better product that supports the ideology. Firefox is sadly not that.
I wouldn't call backdrop-blur trivial or a basic feature. It's non-trivial to implement and used very little. Why should it be a priority?
> (that are available on even no name mobile browsers)
What no-name mobile browser that isn't based on an engine like Chromium has implemented more "basic" features than Firefox? The fact of the matter is that large corporations like Microsoft have given up trying to implement their own custom browser engine and pivoted to using Chromium.
> it doesn't support even the most basic features all other browsers have.
Like backdrop-blur?
> Fighting monopoly with an even better product that supports the ideology.
You're trivializing browser development as if you could build a better browser in a weekend.
Of the 4 major browsers developers only one isn't a billion/trillion dollar corporation; one uses it's monopoly in search to bankroll and push it's browser, one uses their monopoly position in smartphones to force their browser on users and restricts the feature set of it's browser so as not to detract from custom App development, one threw in the towel and just rebranded Chromium, and the last is a non-profit that's financially dependent on the other three for handouts.
Why shouldn't it be? If Firefox can't lead in web development, how do you even expect it to keep up with times?
I'm not sure why someone would defend Firefox's incompetency. I see things as they are and I make decisions based on that.
Even if I see things as they could be, I'd rather not bet my money on Firefox.
A browser doesn't need to be an operating system.
Judging by the massive amount of Google Chrome advertising I see literally everywhere, including billboards and the sides of buildings, I assume it's Google's fault
i honestly have no idea what people complain about when they do. maybe i just have stockholm syndrome, i dunno.
Firefox was mostly funded by Alphabet/Google to avoid antitrust lawsuits/promote their search engine, one of the best scenarios for the "big corpo" is a product (firefox) that doesn't have many users and cater to the most anti-corpo users (users that wouldn't like to use "big corpo" products anyway). At this point mozilla is just a bussiness expense for the big corpo, the cost of doing bussiness.
"Big corpo" can argue, "look we are even funding the competence", the competence need to be small but relevant enough, so while you are thinking that you are fighting the "big corpo" the reality is that you are just helping to keep firefox relevant enough that the "big corpo" can't be sued.
The entire internet discourse is filled with "Chrome evil, use Firefox". Go to any browser discussion on the internet and 99% of the thread is "just use Firefox or Firefox is the best". You would think that everyone uses Firefox. The internet is a bubble. Reality is Firefox usage is pathetic. 32 MILLION people have STOPPED using Firefox in the past 4 years. The browser only has a 3.16% market share.
https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
Chrome is a good browser. Can be considered objectively better than Firefox given its superior performance, equivalent if not slightly better resource usage, web compatibility and integration with the Google ecosystem (which the vast majority of internet population use (excluding niche tech circles)).
I have no vendetta against Firefox. At the end of the day, it is just a browser and that is a personal preference. But people act like it is some sort of saviour that will bring them to the light. There is such an aggressive tribal mentality with browsers. It makes no sense as all browsers look the same, feel the same and have the same functionality. Just a matter of preference given your needs, and for 70% of the population, Chromium delivers.
You can profile this yourself on macOS with Charles Proxy (GUI) or mitmproxy (CLI).
Until this is fixed all I can do is roll my eyes when I see the incessant privacy marketing from Mozilla.
Also you can keep an eye to updated to arkenfox user.js because while using it by default probably will break many websites but they keep track of privacy updates of Firefox.
The telemetry settings they provided basically amount to, we'll phone home to Mozilla either more or less, depending on your settings.
incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org
What data is being communicated? What about that data is harmful to you? (Genuinely asking for more information, not trying to convince you you're wrong.)
Arguments like these always reminds me of the story where some town had a population register that included religion, and then the Nazis invaded.
You don't know how or when the collected data will be misused, whether by the original owner, a malicious third-party breaching their systems, or the government (and even somewhat-stable governments can quickly turn sour, see Russia or the US's recent issues on abortion for an example).
Furthermore, at least in Europe, the GDPR mandates that all non-essential data collection must be strictly opt-in, so regardless of opinions, it's a law with which you have to technically comply (even though lacklustre enforcement allows offenders to get away), but doubly so if your entire selling pitch is based on privacy.
Actual URLs are treated very carefully. The only ways I know that they could be leaked: (1) there is limited exposure via the SafeBrowsing stuff, and (2) if you crash then URLs could be swept up in the crash report and visible to privileged people at Mozilla. Or if you manually submit a profile and don't anonymize it (there's a checkbox to submit URLs that is checked by default), but you have to go out of your way to do that. There very well could be other ways, but browsing history is treated as very sensitive data for both legal and moral reasons.
Personally, I would not trust Mozilla to be unable to answer the question "has this IP address ever used Firefox?", especially if under subpoena. The IP is temporarily in the server logs, it's used for coarse location information, etc. I doubt anyone is all that interested in asking that question, though.
>While the fact that the census 1939 inquired Jewish ancestry is a well known fact in historiography its significance for the identification of individual Jews in the context of the Shoah has been disputed. The thesis argues that a population register introduced in 1939 - the People's Card Index (Volkskartei) - was essential in the identification of German Jews. Consulting new sources it shows that the collation of the census data on ancestry with the Volkskartei was ordered in March 1941 to facilitate the identification and localisation of German Jews in the context of the deportations.
The purpose was only so you could be buried where you wanted, in a preferred cemetery, Catholics in a Catholic cemetery for example, people wanted, and cared about that, back then.
But if you died without relatives... the town had to know.
That puts the comments around here saying "what use can they make of X and Y?" on a new light.
I agree that these questions often are asked by those being deceitful, but the reason that works is because it is a dog whistle. Something that hides in normal speech. But we can't presume that someone asking a question like this is in fact dog whistling. If we do, we only enable to whistlers because honest askers will be put off by pretentious and arrogant responses. It is better to answer in good faith until they show their true colors. Even if it is a dog whistle, others will read this public forum and go "why are they attacking someone who is just asking a question?" That gives them power. So let's be honest here.
Respecting users' privacy at a fundamental level is important for a tool that is our most intimate window to the web (a web browser) even if you personally have 'nothing to hide'.
1) They are not misusing collected information in any way
2) They need it so badly that telemetry is ON by default, without the explicit consent of the user
Both of these are simply addressed by having no telemetry by default and all browser telemetry being completely opt-in.
Given that IP address is legally considered private information and Mozilla claims that Firefox is privacy respecting, becoming a zero-telemetry browser by default should be a no-brainer move to substantiate that claim, othwerise it is just empty words that further detoriate the trust in Mozilla.
It should also be noted that every browser with telemetry ON by default (which is almost every mainstream browser) is also directly or indirectly monetized by ad-tech, which does not help their case at all.
Telemetry is a bit like DRM. Firefox strenuously avoided DRM for a long time, losing a lot of market share in the process, until it became clear that it could not stay relevant without being able to display DRM video. The pragmatic decision was either to (1) stay pure, forbid DRM, and disappear; or (2) give in and support DRM, accept that the battle was lost, and continue to survive in order to influence the battles that had not yet been lost.
The same could be said for telemetry, though it has less impact in either direction (it causes less harm, and not having it is less of an existential threat). And we (I work for Mozilla) did resist it for a long time, longer than was probably healthy for the market share, and eventually gave in. At least with telemetry it could be a somewhat principled capitulation—we are much more careful about avoiding tying together different measures that could be correlated to identify users, and we have a strict approval process when adding new telemetry (I've gone through it several times).
Telemetry is sadly necessary to stay competitive in today's landscape. For example, speed is the #1 reason that people report for switching browsers. Relying on either benchmarks or user reports for performance tuning simply isn't good enough. The signal is slow and massively lossy. We need to know what our actual users are experiencing, and whether a change had a positive impact on real-world usage or not. It's easy to come up with a change that improves benchmarks, at least a little. It's much harder to move the needle on what our users are experiencing. Without telemetry, we would make lots of changes that would overfit for benchmark behavior, adding complexity and producing very little benefit.
The other important piece: opt-in telemetry isn't telemetry. The sampling bias results in massive distortion. Being able to say "this change improves performance *for users who have opted in to telemetry*" is mostly useless. Users who opt in are going to have wildly different hardware, on average.
Opt out is much less problematic, even though it also introduces sampling bias, because in practice not that many people bother to opt out. It's definitely reasonable to argue that the opt out mechanisms should be simpler and more clear.
Though at the end of the day, it's much more important that we collect telemetry in a way that does not compromise the privacy of people who don't opt out, and (imho) we're doing pretty well there. https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/ gives a decent high-level overview. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Data_Collection gives more of the nitty gritty detail than you'd probably want.
To me, the golden age of tracking is over and the privacy of the user is the new gold standard. It doesn't matter that Firefox needs telemetry to survive (and the empirical evidence of Firefox still losing users left and right does not help that case), if it is going to violate someone's privacy over it.
It also does not matter what its privacy policy is (and they can change), the moment Firefox transferred user's personal information, which is the IP address, without their consent, it took away something private from them, that can potentially be used in the future against them.
Here is an analogy. Would you accept telemetry in your apartment or a house, that is built-in and enabled by default, without your consent? Would you freak out that it exists once you find out?
The builder will then try to explain they use it only to improve homes they make, for example to understand what rooms you use and how, and that without it, they would not survive on the market because their main competitors are using it too. Would you care about that or you would seek to find an apartment elsewhere?
The browser is no different. It is the most intimate tool we use in our daily lives. People are fed of our data being used without our consent.
A privacy respecting browser simply can not allow itself to have telemetry by default. Meaning Firefox simply can not call itself privacy respecting if it is transferring user's private information without their consent, by default - no matter what the economic or business justification are. If a browser is choosing to have telemetry for economic interest, it loses the privilege to call itself privacy-respecting or 'a force for the privacy on the web'. Respecting privacy is digital, it is either 0 or 1, you can't be 0.7 privacy-respecting.
Finally, I don't buy the argument that telemetry is helping FIrefox at all. All that telemetry for the last 10 years or so and Firefox is down to less than 5% market share. It lost 50 million users in the last two years alone.
Perhaps Mozilla should consider becoming more user-centric instead and start listening to the users, instead of using telemetry. Go back to its roots of innovation and experiments, to the golden age of Firefox between 2005-2010 when we got Firebug, Ubiquity, Panorama and go back to product annoncements that excite user about the browser.
It's also not necessary to have Mozilla be the bad actor. Anyone who has access to the information in the future is a possible bad actor as they might be able to cross-reference the allegedly "innocuous" information with some future, more-pervasive data.
---
You'll have to rely on your phone's OS stalk you by location. ;-)
- source IP:port
- source OS (through TCP fingerprints)
- destination IP:port
- destination hostname
Now you have to consider where your packets may be diverted and who might want to do what with them.
As the sibling said, the burden of proof is on them. They are the ones who push that on users when there's no technical need.
You ask for a real attack, but you don't seem to accept the example that you were given. I'm not sure what your point is.
Biggest reason I refuse to use Firefox no matter how bad Chromium is. I sometimes use Firefox Focus for doing searches on my phone and the thing is always pinging mozilla services. Some of them location related. No way to turn any of these off on what is supposed to be an incognito browser.
> What I found were dozens of requests, which loaded nearly 16 MB in data. Lets break down what I saw.
> I also reviewed Google Chrome, for those interested: When I launched Google Chrome for the first time (and let it sit for a minute), 32 requests were made, and 7.26 MB of data downloaded.
Presumably Chromium would ping even less than Google Chrome.
There was a study carried out on what kinds of data leaks on browsers during launch [0] but Chromium specifically wasn't measured. I can only infer Safe browsing to be a leak point available on Chromium since it is shipped by default but I have it turned off (never needed it anyway) so I have not observed any pings related to it personally.
[0] https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf
You cannot be preaching about privacy and refuse to provide a simple toggle to opt-out of all telemetry in your software.
FYI I do use ungoogled chromium as my main browser.
That's why I use LibreWolf: it respects my privacy and autonomy, and I help fight against Google's growing web engine monopoly. I specifically don't use UnGoogled Chromium because I don't want to look like "just another Chrome user" when companies decide whether or not they should test web apps on anything besides chrome, or prioritize non-chrome bugs.
Seriously, give LibreWolf a shot. It's a very minimal fork of Firefox that just removes the Mozilla botnet parts of the browser, so it should be (relatively) easy for maintainers to keep it going for the forseeable future. You can install and update it with homebrew. And, y'know... you're not helping Google push around web developers with Manifest V3 ad-blocker killers, AMP, FLOC, etc.
Having a single setting that does all of this would indeed be nice.
https://gist.github.com/ryandaniels/33e443bb401dde665fce15dd...
but yes, a single setting is necessary if you want to also opt out of any _future_ telemetry settings without always having to update your prefs.
Or have they reformed?
Of course it is good to keep your software up-to-date to eliminate known, patched vulnerabilities. But there are enough unknown vulnerabilities out there that you should practice good hygiene on the web anyway. Auto-updates typically happen on a 1-7 day time scale, so you're vulnerable for some time anyway.
I control when my software updates because it's running on my hardware. That I control. I do not like things auto-updating and restarting when I'm trying to use them. It is a distraction from work and a sign of software doing things against my will.
Its whole premise is "I, as a user of this browser, do not want to participate in tracking activities." I don't see why mozilla should be exempt from that intention. I'd be some top shelf :chefs_kiss: if mozilla.org honored the DNT but the browser itself didn't
Telemetry and Tracking are not mutually exclusive; both can be implemented by software developers.
Telemetry is unidentified software usage statistics from a random IP address somewhere on the Internet, generally without caring about whose telemetry it is.
Tracking is an attempt to identify who is operating the software, in order to associate that software's activity with specific human beings in a database.
DNT is Do Not Track, which means "do not attempt to identify me" — but I assume that Firefox telemetry typically isn't attempting to identify you in the first place, so making a statement about tracking with the DNT checkbox would not affect telemetry decisions.
I'd like to express myself and say that I just want a secure and privacy-respecting browser that gets its priorities straight.
Why can't developer of difference capabilities contribute in different ways? I'm a competent developer but I will never be kernel module, crypto, or netcode competent; does that mean I should just forgo contributing to anything?
And I'm not using it to "stick it to Google" either. Containers and tree-style tabs are a huge productivity win.
Also, TST isn't a FF-only feature now (Brave has started the rollout, Orion has a great implementation, and Edge has it also).
My personal path was decades with FF and its predecessors, then Brave because it was much, much faster. Now I'm debating between Orion (which might win on performance/battery, due to being webkit), Brave (which is fast, and is evolving its TST capability), and Firefox (which works fine, but IME is a bit slower).
Over the same time period, web browsers have gone from a hot new technology to a part of daily life for most people in developed countries, and that's created areas for conflict where someone at Mozilla is trying to figure out how to retain users against a hostile trillion-dollar company and coming to conclusions which are different than some of the more conservative members of the user community want. We saw this with things like XUL's deprecation where that feature was blocking a lot of improvements which benefit 100% of users and a small group of users felt very strongly that someone else should do the extensive amount of work needed to maintain and modernize a lightly-used feature.
I wonder whether people who write this kind of press-releases even use Firefox as their primary browser. If you care so much about actually letting users customizing the look and feel of Firefox please just support userstyles as a first-class feature.
I don't want dark mode, period. Who decided that privacy must equal to dark mode, and that there is no easy switch in settings to turn it off?
It's a visual cue to remember what context you are in. I always done that anyway. I have a Pink theme when surfing NSFW sites :)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/pink/?utm_sou...
You can configure themes here:
about:addons
It would be better if we spent the resources on a next generation anonymity network to replace Tor, or some kind of alternative data transport like radio or satellite, which can still be used by small niche communities of free speech activists, for example... A one way data broadcasting system, sending compressed text only, provides near complete anonymity for those receiving it. However as it necessitates buying receiver hardware, it doesn't get very much traction.
And to add insult to injury, browsing artifacts are sometimes remembered in Windows' pagefile and other parts of the OS. Even on Linux, if your distro cares to add stuff to swap, it will dump browsing sessions in plaintext to your hard-drive, incognito/private mode or not. This is why people need to use TailsOS[0] if they're really concerned about not leaving any traces.
There is. The purple and white mask icon in the upper-right window corner, and in each private tab.
> new desktop feature that allowed our users to express their most authentic selves and bring joy while browsing the web.
No, it’s just another color theme setting.
In Firefox, if I login to something in one Private Window, and open a second Private Window, my session is maintained (e.g. login to Protonmail on one, I open a second private window and I'm already logged in). So I assume Firefox is sharing cookies and whatnot between Private Windows.
Brave doesn't do this. If I login in one Private Window in Brave, the new Private Window presents me (correctly) with the login screen.
I've been through my Firefox settings with a fine-tooth comb and cannot identify anything that might be causing this. Hence I assume it is a bug.
(And yes, I mean new window, not a new tab)
You probably should report it to Mozilla https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/
Probably. But I've never had much luck getting any traction on previous reports even when I've made sure to produce great supporting detail to enable reproduction.
I suspect you need to know the right people to get traction on Mozilla bugs. Everyone else just seems to get lost in the swamp.
So I guess its just an extra feature of Brave.
I am curious though. What happens if you drag a private tab into its own window? Is state shared with the original private window? How is this communicated to the user? And what if I drag a different private window tab into the new private window? Does each tab retain it's original window?
Edit: you might be interested in the Firefox add-on Temporary Containers. You can open a new tab in its own container that isn't shared with anything else
Thank you for the suggestion but....
"Containers are disabled .... when Never Remember History is selected in your privacy settings."
Which is a bit of a shit limitation. ;-(
[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
The main problem then, IMO, is that it is not well-supported for a user to use template profiles or automation to manage or create multiple profiles with common settings. Copying profile directories to a separate user account (on platforms that allow that kind of thing) is the closest strong approach I can think of.
Ok fine, but why can't it be a checkbox option in preferences ?
Why can't I tick a box that says "isolate private windows" ?
But it's just not a bug, and I think it should be clear that it will never be a feature.
You should think of it as a private session, not a private window.
I doubt Firefox would want to change from the behaviour shared by other browsers.
> Also, private windows have been redesigned to increase the feeling of privacy.
What does it mean? It doesn't make me feel very confident that Mozilla know what are they doing any more.
I really like Firefox from a usability and features point of view. Multi-account containers are fantastic! I want it to succeed. But a private browsing shortcut and colors don't excite me. I'd love to see improvements in speed and efficiency because FF is still behind the others for me. FF is also the only browser that frequently crashes. Submitted about a dozen stacktraces already so hopefully they'll figure it out one day.
/s
And still, I'll keep on using Firefox, as other browsers are even in a worse state.
Also, the Private Browsing upgrade appears to be just a theme change and a button. Most of the article is nothing to do with Private Browsing, so the title of the post is incorrect.
https://web.archive.org/web/20221018134430/https://news.ycom...
* There are no sponsored ads every time I use common functionality (like opening a new tab)
* At least VS Code has a easily available settings page to turn off telemetry
To do something half way similar, Firefox requires you to venture into `about:config` where you get a "Here be dragons" message to scare users away from touching settings. Not only that, none of the settings are documented anywhere.
Do I trust either of them? No, but at least Microsoft doesn't market "privacy".
You sure about that? They look pretty similar to me.
- https://www.roboleary.net/tools/2022/04/20/vscode-telemetry.html
- "It looks like you cannot shut telemetry off 100%. These settings will
opt you of most data sharing scenarios; but not all data sharing
scenarios."
- Apparently even VSCodium can't kill it all
- https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#disable-telemetryI don't love Firefox having ads but it's also literally a single checkbox which you can choose to uncheck on that page and there's a difference between showing ads and violating privacy. If you want to see a web where privacy is respected more, I'd want it to look at lot like what Mozilla does as an intermediary preventing those advertisers from collecting PII.
about:config
and then search for
browser.tabs.firefox-view
and set to false.
They're spending devs time on useless crap instead of being improving the engine, which clearly needs improvements. For example, I wanted to send some thousands of pictures to Proton Drive (doesn't have a sync App yet) and tried doing it in Firefox. It literally started to take all the computer RAM (my computer has 32 GB) while with Brave it uploaded the entire thing without me even noticing in the computer performance.
It doesn't bother me to a point that I can't use Firefox, but for those who regularly upload files, I can totally see Firefox being a subpar experience.
That's probably not Firefox, but the way Proton encrypts data client-side. The browser has to do a lot of heavy crypto operations. At least that's the case with Filen.io[0]. I was told by support to have a beefy machine since the desktop web app encrypts data on-the-fly before uploading to their servers.
- Arbitrary Add-ons on Firefox for Android when?
- Dev tools on Android when?
Note that I switched to using a Chromium-based browser on Android because it actually cared enough to supports both these things.
Mozilla, listen to your existing users (what few remain of them). You will never get the userbase you're gunning for by mimicking your competitors.
I looked a bit through FF code, and there's an intent to open an empty private tab, but not an address. Alas, with my lack of knowledge about data flow in an Android app, I'm not of much help so far.
Anyway, personally I came to terms with the fact that open-source devs aren't my bitches, and just accept with gratitude what they offer to the world, while abstaining from polluting the trackers even further. However, I'm not above a hopeful whisper into the noosphere.
Settings > Privacy & Security > HTTPS-Only Mode
As far as I know, there are still no practical attacks against TLS 1.2.
I got it back as unsupported when testing (yes, I would prefer to test on something other than Cloudflare but I couldn't find any): https://www.cloudflare.com/ssl/encrypted-sni/
Leaving you pretty much in the same spot than version 105 (with a new icon if you are on MacOS)
firefox -private-window https://google.com/I reside 12 hours a day within the private window itself and the ui looks quite nice now. The purple and all. Keep it up
Also, be aware that (unless something has radically changed) all private windows share state with one another, which to the very best of my knowledge isn't true for the browser containers
1: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/multi-account-conta... and https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers#readme
here is a stupid habit i formed years ago.
when i start my machine, the first firefox window i open is the normal window + containers for email and some other website.
i open private browsing window.
then i go about with my day. any website i have to sign in, like hn, the passwords are saved in firefox so it is just a 2 step process usually. sometimes some website asks for an otp, email or mobile which is a pain but fine.
i can access youtube or whatever, amazon or something else and once a window has too many open tabs, i create a new window and pick up the work from there.
i like how i can close the private windows and everything gets logged out automatically. No stored prefs, no history, no records on my machine, no recomendations say on youtube based on my previous search history or browsing history. Same for amazon. I can search for any darn thing all day and i don't sign in unless i have to actually order something and if i do, i sign in, order and sign out.
This has served me well since 2010 at least and firefox with ABP+noscript at first but then ublock origin....
i am not really concerned about "isp tracking" or google analytics, i have a pihole installed which takes care of most of the things.
>all private windows share state with one another yes. my understanding is that is a feature because as i said, i can open youtube and continue the thread if i open too many tabs (unless i want to close all of them) . the upside of this is, unless one window is open "ctrl+shift+t" works on firefox but not on chromium based browsers and private window. that is a 100% useful feature because i do not rely on browser history for my surfing so if i make a mistake, ctrl+shift+t and i am back.
edit: i log in to HN 3-4 times a day because of this. sometimes once, sometimes 4 times, depending. that is not a bother
me: `guiset gui none`
"is mozilla about open software? or was it about that old RMS (yuck) what was it? looked like a joke... gnu is not gnu?? wut"
/angry-snark
just trying to vent some frustration...
edit: I actually believe that software should guarantee freedom, but I've understood that gnu's play failed, copyright is not the side of freedom of individuals, but on the side of freedom for corporations-as-individuals. my own ignorant opinion (because I'm just guessing) is taboo https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33248402
This one extension is the only reason I'm still using Firefox... And the profiler sometimes works better than Chromium's as well, but seldom I use it.
See the following image for an example of a tree of tabs: https://imgur.com/a/fEWp9h0
But anyway, I'm sad that HTTPS default and isolated cookies are turned on only for Private Browsing (sorry, "Guest Session" from that other silly HN thread, "private" apparently implies you have a rank in the military while using) when both these features aren't super disruptive for general browsing.
Nobody on HN seems to know at all how to market tech to a general audience and play the game of "staying relevant" so they always have something to post to social/newswires.
But many of us also believe that, though it's POSSIBLE Mozilla is acting how you describe ("We are committed to privacy at our core but we have to publish this kind of press release to survive!"), they are actually corrupt at their core to the point where they only see privacy-conscious users as customercattle to be milked.
I believe we critics have good enough intuition to see this kind of behavior from Mozilla as a canary indicating their true nature. This is kind of an aftershock of the Mr. Robot incident. I think it's unlikely that that kind of bad judgment was not chronic and systemic.
Mozilla's problems are in its fundamentals, not its marketing.
The continuing decline in user numbers would tell anyone in leadership that is actually paying attention that this approach is not working. And the idea that the answer to attracting normal people is renaming and pushing themes is, to put it mildly, brain-damaged. It is like nobody at that company has ever actually met a computer user before.
My mom sees that shit? She's gonna go "uh I don't know what Colorways is, why's it gonna go away, I'll just stick with Edge where it showed me 12 colored icons under the Theme heading and I just clicked one." Because that's exactly what I did until the slight annoyed-curiosity-purple-enthusiast got the better of me.
I feel like the scene in Zoolander when the character is befuddled and exasperatedly asks "am I taking crazy pills".
Because they wanted something to talk about social media that was fun and limited time. They were following the Nike playbook with shoe drops including the terminology. Look at the screenshot in the blog post about colorways the art is even a shoe with a basketball.
They were trying something new. Limited time cosmetic drops for browsers that get people hyped in every other context. It confused white people because of how they executed it. Live and learn I guess ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Every non-chrome browser has to answer the question "why use me instead of Chrome" and for Firefox it's the activism. you might not like that but it's what Mozilla's got. At least it's not some crypto nonsense.
Mozilla angling for a cultural victory in the browser war is weird but it's the only thing they and every other alternative browser has. I actually thought the colorway thing was fun when it popped up, browser did actually look fresh and new but yeah probably not gonna move the needle.
Or, you know. Do what Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera etc. all do. Features. It works.
The problem is that Mozilla's raison d'etre used to be about technical merit and user agency, including privacy and customization features. Chrome doesn't set a particularly high bar here, so Firefox could still be about this (and in fact Firefox is still the better choice despite themselves), but over the last few years they've gone in exactly the wrong direction.
Browsers were themeable 20 years ago. Everything used to be themeable. Things like CSS show these roots in their design, but Mozilla thinks that user stylesheets are a "legacyUserProfileCustomizations" instead of a fundamental design feature now.
The whole idea of limited time marketing is to create anxiety and FOMO. It's completely anti-ethical to user-focused design.
Are you thinking of the "Private Browsing reporting for duty" clip?
Private browsing mode is a prime example of that. The current improvement is absolutely miniscule for the amount of bravado they perform around it - but even if you accept it's useful for some, you could ask why private browsing mode exist at all? If that mode had superior privacy protections, why not add those to the normal browsing mode?
I think by making tracking the default and having a special mode for when you really need privacy, they are sort of doing the opposite: Normalising that privacy is an exception.
Welcome to marketing. This icon is a more visible change than 1000 closed PRs in the browser internals. It's Twitter fodder, and to get tech journalists to talk about Firefox.
That would make their master mad. Everything that makes them mad gets taken away.
Because it breaks a lot of web sites, and removes functionality that most people want for most of their usage?
I want my browser remembering where I've been so it can suggest it to me when I want to get back to it. I especially prefer my browser remembering it rather than some server knowing it, or having to re-do searches which is less convenient and means I'm telling the search server what I'm up to.
You might want HTTPS-only mode (bottom section of about:preferences#privacy ). I kind of thought isolated cookies were already the default, as per https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/firefox-rolls-o... but maybe I'm missing a nuance?