IPA now allows these companies to track users across multiple IP addresses, and regardless of the user's cookie settings, via a unique tracking identifier. It is also proposed that the operating system provides the unique tracking identifier which can then be used by all applications or browsers on a device, allowing different devices behind a single IP address to be distinguished.
Any more info on IPA? That link doesn't even say what the acronym stands for. I couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work, too complicated. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have heard of it, and a cursory websearch didn't offer an explanation.
> Mozilla is one of the authors.
Mozilla as a company, or is it that there are Mozilla developers contributing? If Mozilla are planning to introduce a built-in tracking system to Firefox, doesn't that imply shooting off your one remaining foot?
So it looks like Interoperable Private Attribution is mostly Meta people; there's one guy from Mozilla, Eric Rescorla. Eric is not notable for adtech achievements; he's notable for his contributions to internet privacy, and security and cryptography.
Apparently the proposal is to store the match key in browser local storage; which means that you can block it by setting local storage to zero, or by regularly cleaning-out local storage.
That article doesn't mention once the privileges that should be granted to the user. It does mention the powers of the user agent, but that really means the browser manufacturer.
I don't understand how this can work. What is to prevent combining the new ostensibly privacy-preserving attribution with existing tracking technology for enhanced identity tracking?
Mozilla has disabled privacy controls in the past without informing users. For example, they removed the “prompt when setting a cookie” (so that you could reject/accept/accept for this session only) without a replacement. Newer versions just accepted all cookies as persistent, non-session cookies automatically. There are other examples like this.
It's difficult to deal with because as the code evolves, so do the configuration settings. The rate of change is high, and it's not always obvious what is relevant to users (and whether a new feature increases or decreases privacy!), so it's hard to communicate this in release notes.
I would argue that it is better, but not as much better as Firefox. The further you can get away from Google Chrome the better, but any distance is beneficial.
I think Brave hews closely enough to upstream that even if they leave out a feature like this, they still help enforce Google's control of the web by enforcing Chrome's status as "the standard," that many devs target.
But, otoh, maybe perfect is the enemy of good here.
> ... you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.
Using Firefox Developer edition and toggle(s) will get mysteriously turned back on all the time. And Mozilla is not immune to this practice at all for standard Firefox.
Use chromium-ungoogled [1] if you want chrome(ium) without Google-specific stuff.
Using these sort of downstream patch set browsers is rarely a good idea. If it has multiple full-time developers from a respected org dedicated to it, then it can be justifiable (Tor Browser, Brave), but take a look at the gaps in time for these two pages:
I don't understand why someone hasn't just setup an automated build system that patches out google/previously-unseen URLs in each new chromium release, and posts builds. That's all you really need to disable telemetry, surely?
I use Safari all the time on my M1 Air but it’s definitely less capable than Firefox for adblocking. Firefox is the only browser that can run uBlock Origin or uMatrix.
AdGuard on Safari seems a reasonable replacement for uBlock Origin. I also recently learned about https://arc.net/ and https://browser.kagi.com/ as better alternatives, though I haven't tried them out and do not know how they compare in terms of tracking.
Mozilla actively supports online ads and tracking. Without their partnership with Google, they could not continue as a going concern for very long.
The deception is to make people believe that studying them as ad targets through their internet use can be "private". Many will believe this nonsense. Including regulators. "It's OK, folks. Privacy is preserved." Green light to keep on tracking, collecting data and serving ads.
But the study of people's internet use to enable programmtic advertising _is_ the problem. There will be more ads. They will be more personal. The www will become even more annoying. Perhaps moreso than any other medium that has come before it.
To Mozilla, there can be no www without advertising. The truth is that there can be no so-called "tech" companies, monopolisng intermediaries, without programmatic internet advertising. The www does not need it and the original www did not have it.
First Mozilla partners with Yahoo. Then Google. Perhaps Meta will be next. Mozilla is no different than so-called "tech" companies in at least one regard: it cannot find a "business model" besides internet advertising.
Yeah, that is my understanding as well. While many promote Firefox as an alternative to Google Chrome, it simply lacks adequate proof that Firefox is any better than Chrome at tracking. Else, how does Mozilla survive?
What do you do if websites are "best viewed in Chrome"?
Embrace: Embrace the open web, create an excellent product and aggressively promote it until you take over the market
Extend: Chrome experiments and advanced features that improve the user experience and developer experience through Chrome only API and Google services. Even provide these services to everyone who wants to use them free or charge so that the user expectations are elevated to that point and web businesses depend on these by building their products around them. Maybe make developers depend on this "topics" feature even.
Exterminate: Cut off or degrade the free services to 3rd party browsers, remove or tame extensions that harm your business and recoup the costs of the free services. Since you no longer have viable competition, reduce the development of Chrome any further, optimize only for profit. Developers who depend on you ad tech can choose to refuse serving users using another browser or opt out of Google verification or account services? The users will stay like they sat with IE.
Don't use them unless you must. The internet is a big place. Any piece of information of value can be found at its origin and no less than 10 copycat sites, one of which inevitably will work in Firefox with uBlock enabled.
There is a huge difference between the “best viewed in Chrome” I was replying to there, and “simply won't work without Google services” that you are now asking about.
My personal answer to the goalposts in this new position: If a site refuses to work without a Google account, or if Google Ads are blocked, or without some other Google service, they are simply making it clear that I am not the target audience for their broken creation and I should mosey on elsewhere. Much like sites that refuse to work because my stalker blocking measures at home block their adverts (accidentally or, more likely, because those ads are from source that is trying to stalk me across the Internet).
As I said above: this attitude might not be practical for all, or for some all of the time. But it hasn't done me any harm thus far.
Also note that Chrome on my home machine has asked me more than once to enable the new feature. Each time I've said no, I find it has turned on other related features. This may be the final irritation that makes me pull my finger out and switch to Chromium or back to FF¹. I used to switch back & forth every year or two, as one of them did something to irritate me⁴ I switched to the other.
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[1] I switched to Chrome a few years ago when FF went through a period of being unstable²
[2] and because certain extensions didn't have good FF alternatives, because they never were or because some were crippled by the changes in ~2017³, but that latter point is fairly moot as Google is now taking their turn to work towards crippling useful extensions
[3] at least FF's change here were mostly due to massively misreading the room while trying to streamline their platform, where Google's seem to be more malicious when you consider most of the affected extensions are ones that go against their primary business of tracking people & selling adverts.
[4] things breaking after updates, periods of general instability, not keeping up in the performance race for a while, etc.
In descending order of significance (i.e. most important objective first):
1. ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services.
2. ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible.
Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
3. ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency.
However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled. For more details, see Feature Overview.
Terrible is a strong word for UX in an area where all products have 95% the same interface, and distancing means changing the appearance of the titlebar slightly...
I like Ctrl + Shift + P for private mode. Since Ctrl + Shift + N, is inconsistent with ctrl + shift + T, where it open last closed tabs. It should open last closed windows.
So FF just needs to tighten their Tab UI and allow custom keys. Not sure why there isn't a fork of FF that just looks as much as (legally) possible like Chrome.
Why should anyone care about Firefox when not even their parent company cares about it? Mozilla exists solely at the whims of Google anyway. The fight is long over, people on here just haven't accepted it yet.
Fair question. I think in the long run it does. Chromium development is supported by Google and could be closed any time, leaving Chromium based browsers unable to pick up the slack. Without viable alternatives to Chromium people would return to Chrome.
Google also could cut off Mozilla's funding in a heartbeat. Since their management is incompetent (but their engineers are awesome and I love them), they haven't done any serious attempts to diversify their sources of income, or at least to put some of that cash away for a rainy day. Firefox is just as dependent on Google as are any of the Chromium rebuilds. (I am writing this as someone who has been using Firefox since about 2006 non-stop, seeing its market share drop by a factor of ten in that time).
Google does some stupid things, but Chromium is "too big to fail" at this point and it's too essential to products like Android which are also at that same point.
But hypothetically if Google stopped contributing to Chromium the project would be forked and it would live on. Frankly, Google removing themselves from Chromium would fix the one major complaint a lot of people have with it.
I wonder how that works if Google wants to kill the forks. There are a bunch of important components like widevine that can be withheld to put pressure on the project.
Yes, let's ignore all of the contributions from the vast and varied team of smart people that also contribute to a product that is no longer directly tied to "bro".
I have hundreds to thousands of tabs at any given time. If Firefox has issues with those, then one of my plugins must be fixing it well enough for me not to notice.
Alternatively, go to this URL https://www.mozilla.org/firefox/ to fix this permanently.