Mastodawn

Jeff Martin Jul 12, 2024

Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are turned on by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there.

Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice?

Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

UPDATE: The about:config setting for this is `dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled`. It's a bool. Set it to false to turn it off.

Privacy-Preserving Attribution | Firefox Help

Firefox 128 introduces privacy-preserving attribution, allowing advertisers to measure campaign performance while protecting user privacy.

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Jeff Martin Jul 12, 2024

There's hope tho.

In Mozilla's earlier days, they jettisoned a totally new web browser project called Servo. It's sort of a ground-up effort to build a browser using the latest safety tech, like the Rust programming language.

https://servo.org

And the best part is, Servo is totally independent from Mozilla now and they have * independent funding * !

Meaning, Google isn't bankrolling Servo as anti-trust insurance (*cough* Firefox *cough*), so there's a chance it might actually take a real stance against adtech on the web.

Servo is faaaar from ready for general use yet, but it's picking up development speed. Definitely an option to keep an eye on for the future.

Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications.

Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications.

Servo

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Wolf480pl Jul 13, 2024

@cuchaz so if all of us nerds stopped using Firefox as the less-bad browser and switched to (some fork of) Chromium...

how much of a dent would that make in Firefox's user share?

probably not much, but

if Firefox lost all of its users, would that kill Mozilla?

would the death of Mozilla cause Google to be hit with antitrust?

would the end result be better than Mozilla's continued existence?

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undead enby of the apocalypse Jul 13, 2024

@wolf480pl @cuchaz would probably do more harm than good, especially since for example the tor browser is built on Firefox

Also this is just a personal thing but I personally hate the look and feel of chromium browsers. And I’m not aware of any that are worth using, except for maybe ungoogled chromium if you really want to use a chromium based browser for some reason (though I haven’t tried ungoogled chromium)

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Wolf480pl

@enby_of_the_apocalypse @cuchaz
yeah but it kinda feels like Boeing...