Thank you.

Whenever using this trick, I’d suggest using DDG instead of Bing if possible.

There’s a chance duckduckgo does something similar, but sadly I can’t check at the moment.

Leaving a comment so I remember to try it later—unless anyone reading is willing to do so.

No. I simply meant that there exist Chrome users who appreciate what it provides them (features, UI, etc), so for these users to leave they’d have to give up those things. That’s always a hard ask.

I think some people overestimate how many will migrate to Firefox in the near future over this.

• High switching cost compared to finding another extension (e.g. uBO Lite), even if the resulting experience is worse.
• Just as many Firefox users like Firefox, lots of Chrome users enjoy what they have too. They don’t want to lose that.
• The kind of tech-aware person who’d switch over this is much more likely to have seen the news months ago and taken action already.

As fun as it is to imagine an Adpocalypse shocking the masses and pushing them to try out alternatives to big tech, it’s also way too optimistic, I feel.

I’m sorry, I don’t think that’s entirely correct:

Servo aims to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web rendering engine source - About Servo

I think it’d be better to say they’re working on becoming a modern, easy to use alternative to the likes of Gecko and Blink, the engines powering Firefox and Chrome, respectively.

I saw nothing about plans to become a fully featured web browser, even in the roadmap. Do you have anything else to share that supports the browser idea?

Oh, how I get you! I managed to switch to Firefox after a while, but it took some adapting, and still I miss some of Vivaldi’s features. That sidebar is just fantastic.

How about a little positivity?

in one breath

I think you might’ve meant “in one sitting.”

That’s a long page. I can’t promise to do it quickly, but I’ll try taking a look later.

Assuming both the ad and the JS to track said ad are served from a 3rd party (or at least a different domain)

Yes, that’s what I’m saying. I believe that’s mostly the case, especially because websites serve ads from ad networks owned by others. Even in the same company, they’ll often be served from specific domains due to technical decisions.

although without recordings of impressions the utility of that (and privacy risk) is debatable.

If there’s no impression, there’s never any conversion. As long as uBlock is doing its job, you pretty much don’t have to worry about PPA… though, feel free to simply turn if off anyway That’s why they added a toggle, after all.

Ads are a plague, you give them even an inch and they’ll eventually take everything.

Oh, on that we agree. Billboards don’t track physical eyeballs that land on them, so why would virtual ads deserve all these privileges? I think they only manage because they normalized the practice before anyone could stop them, and now we’re all stuck in this hell.

Firefox was one of the last bastions that seemed to be working with us instead of against us.

I trust it still is. Or, at bare minimum, it remains much better than most alternatives.

It’s the first step along a path we don’t want to go down.

I try to always be fair in discussions, even if it means sharing crappy stuff. So I’m very sorry to tell you, but it really isn’t. Back when DRM was implemented, for example, that was an entire mess, with Firefox eventually moving forwards with the implementation in a great compromise. As in, one that left everyone unsatisfied, but allowed users to watch Netflix.

Here’s something interesting to keep in mind when trying to understand Mozilla’s actions, from the Manifesto:

Principle 9

Commercial involvement in the development of the internet brings many benefits; a balance between commercial profit and public benefit is critical.

If I understand this properly, I believe you’re missing the point. I’ll explain my reasoning so you can point out any flaws you perceive in my reading of your comment or my argument.

You’ve focused too much on how uBlock could theoretically (or not) block outgoing DAP calls and JS code execution. This is way past the point where UBo would’ve done its job. You need to consider the order in which these events may happen and how they depend on one another.

From the explainer:

At impression time, information about an advertisement is saved by the browser in a write-only store. This includes an identifier for the ad and whether this was an ad view or an ad click.

A site can register ad impressions, either when the ad is shown or when the ad is clicked, at their discretion.

If the ad is never downloaded, something UBo is great at guaranteeing using filter lists, the user could never reach impression time. The JS code is likely never downloaded. An impression is never generated. There is no point in generating impressions for nonexistent, unseen ads. That would be garbage data, which is actually worse for advertisers. No impression data is ever generated, thus there’s nothing to send to the aggregate either.

The user does not participate in the system, at all, because it depends on actually engaging with its components, and UBo users have freed themselves from this system completely long ago.

Remember, this is not a privacy enhancer targeted at people who use UBo, but at people who don’t, which is still most people, sadly.

There is very limited ability to surgically remove such things.

There is no need to do so. UBo removes ads with prejudice.

Regardless none of that changes the fact that this should have been opt-in from the start instead of opt-out.

I’m still on the fence about this. Currently, the way I see it, Mozilla’s biggest sin is being awful at effective communication. Worse than Google, but Google has intent to deceive, while Mozilla seems like they’re actually trying to do it properly and just… not getting it right. Spectacularly. Multiple times in a row.

Assuming user consent really stinks, though.

but that alone suggests there might be privacy problems with this entire thing.

I’m not sure if this is a good argument. This is by design, aggregate anonymization works with quantity. I don’t think that means it’s necessarily a bad design. We use lots of faulty, problematic tools everyday—so long as this one is better than what it’s trying to replace, I believe it deserves a chance.

This wouldn’t be the first time that a supposedly anonymized data set could be at least partially de-anonymized.

Yes, that’s true. I’m choosing to both hope all these experts make it work, while also keeping a careful eye on the project, to the extent of my ability. Maybe you could call it a lazier version of trust, but verify.

I have ad blockers and anti-tracking extensions, but they don’t do anything against this new feature because it’s the browser itself doing it.

I don’t think that’s the case. If you have e.g. uBlock, the API for this new feature won’t be called, even if enabled, according to Colin (developer for Multi-Account Containers) in the Mozilla General matrix chat. I’d lean towards trusting Colin over you, here.

And, please, don’t bother Colin over this. I only mention him because if I didn’t, I just know some people would downvote and ask for a source, despite never providing any source for the opposite themselves.

I get your point, and your frustration, but please don’t talk so confidently about things you aren’t actually certain of.

Seems they’re both from the same developer, with slightly different objectives. However, uMatrix’s repository has been archived and hasn’t updated in years. Even if you use a fork, the first line of the README is “Definitely for advanced users.” I don’t consider uMatrix a working solution for the average user, which is most people.

I don’t feel like engaging with the first phrase of your comment as it is, lacking even a single concrete example or further resources to look into.

Edited to clarify which one I was referring to.

The definition of issue here changes significantly from person to person, from some disliking Firefox’s visual design to others criticizing business and technical decisions by Mozilla.

Honestly, there’s nothing I feel like bringing up and starting another discussion over. I mostly added that to stop certain folks from cleverly answering “but what about <issue>? Mozilla isn’t a saint!” As though that wasn’t taken into account from the start.

All the more reason to use Firefox with uBlock Origin if you can, which despite concerns regarding Mozilla are still much more likely to align with users’ best interests and help you avoid being tracked all over the web.

Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.

What does this even mean?

Currently using HB as well and it’s really nice. I’d like to try FlorisBoard again in the future, after they’ve reached some of their milestones. Seems like it’d be even nicer… If only it made such progress. Not complaining, though, I’ll wait as long as they need.

Well, that’s wonderful to hear!

If you’re wondering what sort of issue being careless with licenses can cause, see the (in)famous case of Tivoization. GPL 3 was written partly to solve issues like this.

The Free Software Foundation explicitly forbade tivoization in version 3 of the GNU General Public License.
Wikipedia

Note how issue here is still subjective. Linux stays on GPL 2 and the people in charge are largely uninterested in planning a path forwards, or outright refuse to even consider it.

For a more recent example of how community/contributors and owner/company interest misalignment can make a huge mess, see the consequences of HashiCorp changing the Terraform license from MPL to BUSL. Relevant facts I’d like to note:

• This caused a large split in the community and with HC (“drama”).
• This was only possible due to their CLA (Contributor License Agreement) requirement for contributors.
• This eventually resulted in the birth of OpenTofu, a fork of Terraform managed by the Linux Foundation.

Or, for a slightly funny case:

A while back I saw a project on GitHub licensed as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The developer was considering writing a guide for contributors, even though I’m pretty sure you can’t fork and modify it to open a PR (popular way to offer contributions), because that’d break the ND clause (sharing derivatives). Were people supposed to e-mail patches straight to the developer? Who knows! There are people who are into that, such as some Linux Kernel folks.

And finally, here’s what I thought was a very interesting take on what “free” means when talking about software licenses, touching upon obligations, rights and copyleft.

I’m trying to avoid opining too much, even though I can’t help it and, really, it’s inevitable. I hope these serve as entry points for further research, and that they help you form your own perspective on all this. And if you do happen to end up agreeing with me in the end… well, I obviously won’t complain :^)

I might not be the best person to explain this, but I believe you are, in fact, missing a bit of context.

Outside of software spaces the discussion around copyright seems so much more nuanced.

Inside software spaces, specific needs beget specific discussions. They are as nuanced as they need to be.

Did you know Creative Commons themselves recommend against using CC licenses for software?

what is the insistence in the free software community for what seems like total license purity?

The software world, and open source in particular, has historically had a lot of complex and frustrating moments due to licenses and the misaligned interactions of volunteers and companies. This probably leads many people to strongly advocate for what they believe would’ve helped in the past, and may help in the future.

I even see software engineers arguing that “everyone” should use Apache or MIT and not the other, which is somehow bad for the FOSS community.

I won’t get into whether everyone should use Apache or MIT—which aren’t considered copyleft, I think—but it’s also important to remember that even inside software spaces, people will often hold different and sometimes even conflicting views regarding ethical/ideological matters. They can also be just straight up wrong due to lack of knowledge, experience, misunderstandings, etc. That includes me, by the way!

I hope that helped. I can point more resources later, if you want.

Depends on what you mean by trust. This wasn’t made any clearer by reading the article.

“We promise not to do bad things” is not a safe long term contract. If they can change the terms at any moment and retain control, then they can break that promise and that’s final.

This is why open source matters. This is why we shouldn’t let people try to change the meaning open source. True open source is forever open, it is the author’s Ulysses pact.

FUTO keyboard is source available, and that’s final, too. Whether it is also “source first” and if that term is worth recognizing at all is a separate and entirely valid discussion. Even the worst incarnation of source available is still generally better than closed source, in my mind.

Can there be a trusted space between open and closed source? Maybe, I don’t see why not. Again, define trust, and who’s judging. Some people already trust closed source proprietary software, for some reason, while others strongly reject anything that isn’t free software—remember, we’re not talking about price, here.

I wish FUTO and Rossman all the best, as I do with the free software ecosystem and most of open source. Open source is open source, though, let’s not get it twisted.

Thank you for clarifying, and with a reference, too. That’s pretty much what I thought. It’s great to have confirmation, though.