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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Missing from this article is: How do I disable this.

My initial thoughts are: I don't have any reason to trust fastly or their motivations. I certainly don't have any desire to use them as a proxy server for all of my HTTP traffic.

I'll review the OHTTP spec carefully, which seems to have been put forward by mozilla (who I have limited faith in) and Cloudflare (whose motivations are suspect), and evaluate this in depth, but for now I just don't want to worry that a browser update is going to cause firefox to start sending my data to a third party.

If the concern is that websites know what our IP is due to HTTP requests, we already have some solutions for that, a VPN being a good one. Mozilla already offers a VPN.

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Without going into trust / motivation / etc. of various organizations, OHTTP is not used for general purpose web browsing. This Fastly service is used by Mozilla in conjunction with their own origins, not to random origins on the Internet.

Sadly neither the Fastly nor the Mozilla blog clearly states this out, or lists down the origins/services for which this is enabled.

This Fastly blog post is really meant to announce the working relationship.

It's not my place to say specifically what this is for (although I imagine Mozilla may announce it themselves), but as of now it's a single use case.

You can disable the configuration in the `network.trr.use_ohttp` field. It's already disabled on my Firefox 118.0.1 (NixOS 23.05)

OHTTP is designed for low latency or lightweight applications. A VPN (or MASQUE, to later comments) requires that you do two handshakes before making a request: one with the VPN and one with the server you want to talk to. OHTTP does away with the second and, where where you are making multiple requests, lets the first handshake only occur once (a VPN/MASQUE can do this too).

Now, this has very little to do with what you might trust Firefox or Mozilla to do. OHTTP only provides a degree of anonymity. If you don't want to share the data that is carried in the message, then you might want to disable the request, not the privacy protections that OHTTP provides. Firefox will use OHTTP for different purposes, so you need to look at each in turn.

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