LWD

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:

  • It's made by an ad company
  • The same ad company runs multiple popular ad blockers (including AdBlock Plus)
  • There are no standards on privacy invasion

uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.

The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla's own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.

I'm still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

It's probably the nature of the change, too.

  1. It's easy to add a switch to disable the button.
  2. It doesn't cut into their bottom line.
  3. It's damn good PR.

Other stuff that people have been complaining about, like the massive backlash against baking in 3rd-party AI, won't make the cut.

Relatively benign things like tab grouping are challenging, so despite being much more popular, the easier-to-implement AI features were given a fast pass to Release versions of Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Are there raw numbers on how many people use web browsers in general? Firefox releases a report, and it's definitely been dipping, but that dip might be accounted for by a switch to other browsers (based on its percent of market share).

I'd be curious if you had any good sources for this, because my searches are mostly yielding crappy listicle blogs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

I've seen their reasoning, but I don't agree with it. The biggest counterexample to their concerns are other browsers: Firefox is no trouble maintaining its IP, and Brave is fully open source yet has not been formed once AFAIK.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I'm very aware of its built-in bloat, but the ad blocking still seems to perform more like an MV2 ad blocker than an MV3 one (more is blocked even when using the same lists), and it allows you to natively select individual elements to block yourself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Based on every browser statistic page I can find, about 2/3 of mobile traffic is through Google Chrome. There's no ad blocker on that.

And mobile traffic is significant nowadays - it comprises around half of all traffic anywhere, despite requiring the viewer to be hunched over a phone or tablet.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No argument from me there. I didn't mean to come across this argumentative, I just wanted to point it out here because of the context of this post (someone looking to move away from Firefox). And because, to me, ad telemetry still is a black box.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (6 children)

Mozilla is adopting a ton of the things that were wrong with Brave. Recently, Brave criticized Mozilla's PPA data collection for being too centralized, which implies to me that otherwise, there's a lot of overlap between the two allegedly "private" systems. I don't trust Brave telemetry, but it seems not even they can come up with many ways to differentiate themselves from Mozilla.

If they're different somehow, I would love to know how.

In a way other than accrued trust or distrust, that is. At this point, I don't think Mozilla is owed any inherent trust.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Santander Bank user [solved by reducing ETP to Standard] (almost lost this user we've had since 2003!):

Give this employee a raise

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

How worried should people be if they are on the latest version of Fennec, which was last updated for 129.0.2 a couple months ago? (For anyone who isn't keeping track: that's not ESR (128 is), and it's two major versions behind Firefox Release).

[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I wasn't going to make a generic comment about how cryptocurrency is only worth money to people if they can convince other people to also purchase the cryptocurrency...

... But then I looked at your post history, and it's like a week of pivoting conversations to be about Monero.

Edit: oh god it was worse than I thought

-1
deleted (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Today, when I navigated to amazon.com on Firefox for Android, I received a jarring message that I could "try" a new service, Fakespot, on the app.

What's Fakespot? A "review-checking, scammer-spotting service for Firefox."

Among other things, FakeSpot/Mozilla was forced to admit:
"We sell and share your personal information"

Fakespot's privacy policy allows them to collect and sell:

  • Your email address
  • Your IP address
  • Account IDs
  • A list of things you purchased and considered purchasing
  • Your precise location (which will be sent to advertising partners)
  • Data about you publicly available on the web
  • Your curated profile (which will also be sent to advertising providers)

Right before Mozilla acquired them, Fakespot updated their privacy policy to allow transfer of private data to any company that acquired them. (Previous Privacy Policy here. Search "merge" in both.)

Who asked for this? Who demanded integration into Firefox, since it was already a (relatively unpopular) browser extension people could have used instead?

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