Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking

https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/08/30/changing-our-approach-to-anti-tracking/

by ronjouch • 8 years ago

858 371 8 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

SimeVidas• 8 years ago

The new options that are available in Firefox Nightly: https://i.imgur.com/GMHGDvy.png

alphabettsy• 8 years ago

I’m sure the ad industry will find new ways, but the speed increase was pretty big for me after adding a Pi-Hole.

dddddaviddddd2• 8 years ago

Main difference is that browser makers (Mozilla, Apple, Google for non-Google ads) are becoming hostile to ads and tracking rather than trying to be neutral.

bilbo0s• 8 years ago

Google ?

If Google is not hostile to all ads, then they are not "becoming hostile to ads".

M2Ys4U• 8 years ago

Why is that a _bad_ thing?

alien1993• 8 years ago

That's great news, will this be on par with Ghostery features wise or will it be less granular?

javery• 8 years ago

This post has third party JS in it from Google Analytics that looks to be accepting a bunch of fairly unique looking parameters.

tunap• 8 years ago

Yep. Moz hits all the right talking points... then implements/participates in said behaviors. In a good way, supposedly.

firloop2• 8 years ago

However, Mozilla has a special agreement with Google Analytics that ensures all data is anonymized.

Some discussion which mentions that here: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

spacehome• 8 years ago

Surely we can trust Google.

TekMol10• 8 years ago

Jesus, that is not about Google Analytics on Mozillas websites but on the about:addons page of Firefox. That is terrifying.

realusername• 8 years ago

(from your Github issue) > We won't use Piwik. Mozilla uses Google Analytics for website analytics. Hosting our own is more work for a worse product.

Apparently there's some people who are not fans of Piwik, that's a shame.

lucideer3• 8 years ago

The fact that someone in the organisation actually thought "on let's approach Google and ask for this special agreement" shows a naïvety that really shouldn't exist in a company I'm supposedly trusting to protect my privacy.

I really hope this kind of non-sense starts changing in Mozilla soon. This post is promising, but—as the gp points out—still not without glaring irony/hypocrisy.

ummonk• 8 years ago

Between this and the stupid Mr. Robot thing, I’m starting to seriously question the judgement of PMs at Mozilla (or Firefox at least).

amelius• 8 years ago

Good news. They should also refine their approach of "containers", and I've listed some ideas here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16866086

(perhaps their new approach comes close to these ideas)

ronjouch• 8 years ago

I think they are, slowly. See the Firefox Weekly 44 ( https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2018/08/29/these-weeks-in-f... ) and search for "Contextual Feature Recommender": they're starting by experimenting pushing their Facebook Container addon.

Screenshot: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/files/2018/08/f712ffde-1c33...

tialaramex2• 8 years ago

I really like Facebook Container. I completely forget it's there most of the time. Last time I remembered was because I saw an advert before an embedded Youtube video - I pay for Youtube so it doesn't have adverts, but of course the Container doesn't know that. The partitioning that results makes lots of sense for me.

daveFNbuck3• 8 years ago

The Facebook Container plugin has features that aren't available in the Multi-Account Containers plugin, such as limiting the container to a domain so it doesn't follow you when you click a link. Facebook containers should just be a default/recommended setting for the core containers plugin rather than something that requires its own special plugin.

beat2• 8 years ago

I'm posting this from Firefox. I think this article, on top of other recent efforts by Mozilla, is the final push to switch me from Chrome to Firefox. I trust Mozilla a lot more than I trust Google these days.

0xmohit6• 8 years ago

But Mozilla trusts Google more than any search engine provider. That would be the only explanation for Google being the default search engine.

ct02• 8 years ago

Google just pays the most, I think that's where most of Firefox's income comes from.

beat2• 8 years ago

I'm less concerned about the search engine than I am about tracking from within the browser. Feel free to mock me for that if you disagree.

cweagans2• 8 years ago

A giant pile of cash is a pretty compelling reason to set Google as the default. I don't think trust has anything to do with it.

3945492• 8 years ago

But Mozilla trusts Google more than any search engine provider. That would be the only explanation for Google being the default search engine.

The real explanation doesn't have anything to do with trust: Google pays Mozilla a lot of money to be the default search engine on Firefox. Deals like that are Mozilla's main source of revenue.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/googles-back-its-firefoxs-defa...

ct02• 8 years ago

You and me both. Have you noticed that "some" apps google has developed run like garbage when using firefox? Also, have you switched search engines as well?

21• 8 years ago

The YouTube experience is way worse for me in Firefox than in Chrome. Many times, after seeking inside a video 3 or 4 times, it just stops working. This never happens in Chrome.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but seeing this so often...

toxican• 8 years ago

While I wouldn't put it past Google to do something nefarious to make this happen, I have noticed they like to take super bleeding edge features and run with them before they're standard, simply because they can. Could be the result of that.

cdirkx• 8 years ago

Just today I noticed Google serves a different version of search to Firefox on Android when compared to Chrome. It is missing some features and harder to use. Apparently the fix is to change your useragent string so Google will give you the full version [1].

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1202615

Someone1234• 8 years ago

The thing that tipped it over for me was the Multi-Container Tabs[0] Mozilla extension. Aside from being a fantastic privacy and security tool, it is also wonderful for development.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

sammorrowdrums• 8 years ago

Yep, I switched and use that every day.

mbroshi• 8 years ago

My favorite hidden feature in Firefox is having multiple profiles[0],[1]. Unlike containers, profiles have separate bookmarks, extensions, etc. I have found profiles even more useful than containers for development.

[0] about:profiles (paste into URL bar in Firefox)

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profile-manager-create-...

some_account5• 8 years ago

Try the Temporary Containers plug-in, it's even better. It will automatically remove all site cookies when you close the tab, and can be configured to open all links as a self contained container.

Basically every site you visit will be completely isolated - and fully cleaned up afterwards.

tedmiston3• 8 years ago

This looks similar to profile switcher / People menu in Chrome [1]. Chrome's implementation restricts the entire window to belonging to one person, but I use separate windows for this use case already anyway. I'm not sure that I see the use case for the in-between abstraction.

Can you selectively enable an add-on / extension for only one container but not others in Firefox with this extension?

[1] https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824

Tomte• 8 years ago

I stopped using them when I realized they can switch into a "Facebook" container when I visit Facebook, bit they can't switch back out of it when I subsequently visit another site.

This was a common feature request. Has it been implemented, yet?

tzs• 8 years ago

Do the different contains each have their own bookmarks and history?

chrisjc• 8 years ago

I made the switch soon after the Firefox improvements (Quantum?). Chrome was becoming so slow and unstable (OSX), and although there are many sites with Firefox compatibility issues (or at least I assume it's comparability) I haven't looked back. It kinda reminds me of the day way back in time when I first discovered Firefox and I was liberated from IE.

Thank you very much Firefox/Mozilla team!

edit: One of the "compatibility" issues I always have with Firefox are sites complaining about the adblocker I'm using. The thing is, I'm not. lol

te_chris• 8 years ago

I recently started a new job and took a fresh laptop as as good an excuse as any to switch to Firefox. It's great! It's fast, dev tools are good. I don't miss anything from chrome apart from the automatic google translate - joys of being in the EU.

mmebane• 8 years ago

How will this interact with other privacy tools such as Privacy Badger? Are they safe to use together? Will they negatively interact?

daveFNbuck3• 8 years ago

The most annoying thing from the current version is that when a site doesn't work, even completely turning off your privacy plugins won't necessarily fix it. You have to remember that this is another thing that you may have to disable to use a site. Other than that, it should be fine.

iaskwhy• 8 years ago

I use another browser for those sites. So Firefox with all the fancy add-ons for 99% of my browsing and then Edge for those times I really can't have it failing on me (any sort of payment, that's pretty much it).

bsdubernerd• 8 years ago

I've been blocking 3rd-party cookies since a decade now. I have never witnessed any website breaking. And I do regularly buy from online shops (ebay, amazon, lots of others) while blocking 3rd-party cookies.

I'd really want to know which websites do break, and if they do, in which fashion.

jmspring• 8 years ago

I’ve had online bill pay sites - typically banks - fail with some tracker blocking enabled.

jiveturkey• 8 years ago

same. those all work for me now, though, since maybe 1 year ago.

sammacbeth_• 8 years ago

Here are some examples: https://whotracks.me/blog/block-third-party-cookies.html

Mithriil• 8 years ago

Do you use an add-on to block cookies? If not, how?

crtasm• 8 years ago

Firefox has an option for allowing third party cookies: always/from visited/never.

coolspot• 8 years ago

I also recommend Cookie AutoDelete for firefox[1] and Chrome[2].

1 - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode...

2 - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...

joemccall86• 8 years ago

Google Meet would basically not work for me until I enabled third-party cookies. Nobody could hear my audio.

TheRealPomax5• 8 years ago

The immediate thought is "sites that rely on content being discussable" through things like disqus and the like (mostly because that covers one of my websites). The third party cookies allow for off-site autologins. Of course, allowing them also lets BS like facebook in so I'd love to see browser get built-in automatic third-party blocking with per-site whitelisting of 3rd party domains (I would love to auto-clear disqus on sites I actively use, but not on sites that happen to have it slapped onto a random 1 paragraph "news" item).

welder• 8 years ago

They fix this by opening a new window and having you login directly to Disqus.com so the cookie can be set. Disqus login still works with third-party cookies disabled...

However, don't use Disqus because they inject vulnerable JavaScript onto the page from unvetted ad networks and inject their affiliate links into every external link on your page[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus#Affiliate_links_and_thi...

KajMagnus2• 8 years ago

Maybe this one? Embedded comments in an iframe, and if you login, there'll be a session cookie, in the iframe. There's no tracking — each blog has its own unique sub domain with unique cookies, and no cookies on the 2nd level domain. Still, disabling 3rd party cookies in Chrome seems to break login:

https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments

(what happens if you try to post a comment. I think there'll be an error. I'm developing this b.t.w.)

xfitm32• 8 years ago

I’m a big fan of Mozilla, and I’m really glad to see them focusing on Firefox instead of troubled projects like FirefoxOS.

While they are not immune from poor decisions I really believe they try to do the right thing in the end. That’s more than I can say for many other companies.

glogla• 8 years ago

FirefoxOS was out last hope for good and accessible mobile operating system - it was supposed to give people who can't afford iPhone something open, instead of evil data-slurp that is Android.

Without it, billions of people in developing world are going to have every every second of their lives snooped by Google.

It failed, but it was still a good idea.

rglullis• 8 years ago

There is still hope. It didn't failed, just has morphed into KaiOS, which is primarily focused on the developing world.

kibwen4• 8 years ago

Agreed; even from the start I had a dim view of FirefoxOS's chances for success, but the sheer audacity of the move (in conjunction with the implicit acknowledgement of how important it is to have influence over the underlying platform, for the long-term sake of both Firefox specifically and the web in general) earned Mozilla a lot of goodwill from me. (The other audacious move from that period that won my goodwill was their investment in Rust/Servo, for which I initially had a similarly dim outlook and have been happily surprised at how they've far exceeded my expectations; goes to show that "audacious pie-in-the-sky idea" doesn't have to imply "tire-spinning boondoggle".)

alexkavon3• 8 years ago

Let’s not forget the upcoming mobile Purism OS coming with the Librem 5.[0]

I believe the development kit for apps is now available.

[0] https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

cptskippy• 8 years ago

I think a hard fork of Android might have been a better approach. The AOSP has a lot of good, it's just controlled by Google and is more of a source dumping ground and less of an open source project.

They might have even been able to work with Amazon, who has a vested interest in Android a la FireOS, and possibly forced Google to make AOSP a truly open project.

hardwaresofton3• 8 years ago

What annoyed me the most is that FirefoxOS failed because it was mismanaged and badly planned -- It was a a fantastic idea, and the concept worked -- people were buying the phone but they just picked the absolute wrong market to aim at.

I think it was a huge mistake to abandon FFOS but not enough people felt that way.

Compare how FFOS did to how Ubuntu Phone did which was essentially vaporware IIRC.

jimmaswell• 8 years ago

Without it, billions of people in developing world are going to have every every second of their lives snooped by Google.

Still sounds like a better deal for them than no smartphones at all. Do they even care about Google's data collection? I find it to be a perfectly fair tradeoff for cheaper smartphones and free services.

criddell• 8 years ago

How was FirefoxOS better than AOSP?

openfuture• 8 years ago

I think you are being a touch dramatic, I am perfectly happy with my google free lineageOS setup. Though I agree with what you are saying and the developing world is not really using LOS I still think there is more hope now than then.

theravengod• 8 years ago

How was FirefoxOS better than Android ?! Giving back control of the OS to carriers. Do you remember/know how hard it was for an indie dev. to publish an app that could be used by millions of people in the J2ME/BREW/RIM era ?

sixothree• 8 years ago

It still lives on. Sort of... https://www.kaiostech.com/

fantispug• 8 years ago

It's good to see an article about Firefox enhancing privacy, rather than for backdoor installing plugins for Mr Robot, integrating closed source Pocket (the server is still closed source despite the Mozilla acquisition), or opting in sending browsing history to commercial companies like Cliqz without explicit user consent.

Mozilla has done incredibly well to have Firefox survive at all against competition from Microsoft and Google, and has undoubtedly had to make some tradeoffs (such as DRM), but it's at its best when it sticks to its principles.

xfitm32• 8 years ago

Pocket is working on open sourcing their product, including the backend. Give them some time.

HIPisTheAnswer2• 8 years ago

Firefox is an OS

remir• 8 years ago

I still think Firefox should compete against ChromeOS because more and more of what we do with computers can be done in a browser.

This is something Mozilla should think about. There's a market for something like Chrome OS (digital signage, library PCs, the elderly, schools, etc).

TekMol10• 8 years ago

This seems to be a blacklisting solution. Some third party code gets filtered.

I prefer a whitelisting solution. umatrix is a very elegant tool for this. You can say

    On domain thisandthat.com allow scripts from domain
    soandso.com'

   On domain funkycars.com allow images from
   domain carimageserver.com

That is exactly the level of whitelisting that feels logical to me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

I wonder how closely Mozilla analyzes the addons they offer for download? Are they as trustworthy as Firefox itself?

kemitche• 8 years ago

Whitelisting while keeping every website moderately functional seems impractical for the Mozilla team, which means the burden of choosing what to allow falls on the end user.

While that's a great approach for privacy, the usability loss would probably drive the average person away from Firefox. I think the listed approach is likely best for the average user, but I think it would be nice to have an option for a power user to turn on a whitelist-only mode. (One could argue that "install an extension" is an appropriate "option" for the power user, but as you mention, it's nicer to not need to rely on third party extensions)

3945492• 8 years ago

Whitelisting while keeping every website moderately functional seems impractical for the Mozilla team, which means the burden of choosing what to allow falls on the end user.

I've used NoScript for a long time, and the hardest thing is knowing what the domain is doing so I can decide what to allow. It's hard to tell the difference between opaquely named ad-networks and opaquely named media player providers.

It would be nice if someone could start compiling a database that

1. groups together the domains used by different sites and services (e.g. website.com and website-images.com) and

2. includes a brief description of their purpose or business.

So, doubleclick.com and doubleclick.net could be grouped and easily identified as an ad network, google tag manager is a tracker, etc.

I doubt such a list would take any more effort to maintain than the current ad-blocker lists.

barrkel• 8 years ago

umatrix is a landmine of broken checkout and payment navigations for inexpert users.

ljcn• 8 years ago

And relatively expert users too. I adore uMatrix but sometimes open a specific browser just to make a purchase, then wipe all trace of it.

Semaphor• 8 years ago

Yeah, but for non-techies? As a fellow uMatrix user I love it, but normal people don't want to set up a whitelist for every site they visit and get broken websites without.

TekMol10• 8 years ago

edit: Removed some nonsense I wrote in a hurry. Sorry.

ChrisGranger• 8 years ago

I wonder how closely Mozilla analyzes the addons they offer for download? Are they as trustworthy as Firefox itself?

This has been a contentious discussion of late. Mozilla does manual (human) code review add-ons after they're submitted to AMO and made available for install, but they don't tell you which add-ons have been reviewed by a person and which haven't. It's apparently too costly and slow a process to review every submission, so much of this is automated, for better or worse.

Sophisticated users can download them and look at the code, as .xpi files are really just zip archives, but everyone else is on their own.

pmfgpmfg• 8 years ago

performance is the wrong motivation behind blocking trackers. they should be blocked because they're wrong, not because they slow website load pages.

CaptSpify• 8 years ago

Why not both? I agree with you that they should be blocked because they are wrong, but I'd also agree that they should be blocked because they are slow.

TekMol10• 8 years ago

Uh oh, I just learned that Mozilla injects Google Analytics tracking code into Firefox itself. When you go to about:addons, it sends tracking data to Googles servers.

Is there a way to get rid of that? It seems to be not blocked by a default umatrix for example.

I think we really need a browser by a more trustworthy party. Maybe Debian could make a Firefox fork that is more user friendly in terms of privacy? Is there a way for vote for this or sponsor such a development?

JohnTHaller• 8 years ago

Mozilla has a special agreement with Google for this that anonimizes the data.

TekMol10• 8 years ago

I'm sure every tracking company out there says they do only good with the data they track. If that is what it takes to make tracking ok, then why bother at all?

natch7• 8 years ago

For certain values of “anonymizes.”

/snark

c3534l• 8 years ago

You cannot anonymize data and we've known this since the Netflix data was famously deanonymized. "Anonymized data" is what people call it when they're lying or don't know enough to be trusted with privacy. The primary issue is that data that seems harmless in isolation can be powerful in aggregate, that any data unique enough to be informative to a third party can be used to triangulate an individual's identity, and that data which cannot be matched up with a user today might be in the future when more information is available or statistical tools are improved. If Firefox actually does say they "anonymize" your data, that's a pretty damning indictment on their lack of trustworthiness and diligence.

bopbop3• 8 years ago

Apparently it respects Do Not Track, according to some discussion above and at https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

The link also seems to say you can block it in uMatrix, but it isn't by default

buckminster2• 8 years ago

It appears to be blocked by uMatrix but the author notes further down that firefox is silently ignoring the block. This is very concerning.

TekMol10• 8 years ago

No, you cannot block it via umatrix or any other extension. If you read the whole discussion you will see that this only was possible in the old extension tech that Mozilla meanwhile replaced with webextension. And those can't.

They injected a non-removable external tracking system right into the browser that they market as privacy focussed.

ianbicking• 8 years ago

Firefox has a blacklist of sites that can't be modified by extensions, specifically addons.mozilla.org and testpilot.firefox.com (which can both install extensions). It's there to protect against malicious extensions that might try to install further extensions or otherwise escalate permissions by making use of those sites' permissions.

That block is also going to keep uMatrix from being able to block anything specifically on addons.mozilla.org

opan• 8 years ago

Icecat has less tracking. https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/icecat.html

singularity20014• 8 years ago

That is shocking and disgusting. Is that even allowed under new EU law?

mirimir3• 8 years ago

Can one block in hosts? Or does it use too many hostnames/IPs?

Edit: OK, so I've played some with Wireshark. And it seems that Firefox is talking to many Google servers. So blocking google-analytics.com in hosts seems to do nothing. But then, this is a Firefox install with several extensions, so it's impossible to say who's doing what. So hey, I guess I need to check this out in a LiveCD VM.

yuhong2• 8 years ago

I mentioned the history of Google Analytics/Urchin in the essay too.

have_faith• 8 years ago

What are the requirements for what gets blocked and what doesn't get blocked? Is there a heuristics based approach to tracking blocking or is it all still cat and mouse with block lists? I'm not up to speed on any breakthroughs in that regard.

skywhopper• 8 years ago

Unclear from this article is how they determine what is a "tracker"? I assume there'll be a curated block list, maybe based on anonymously collected data. But that detail is key to whether this is a success or not.

kevsim• 8 years ago

Yeah, I'm left wondering the same thing.

Apple's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (version 2 of which will ship in Safari/iOS 12 in September[0]) uses some sort of ML-based solution to decide what is and what is not a tracker, blocks cookies from being sent to domains that haven't been visited in a first party context, and has an explicit way for the user to opt-in to cookies being sent upon interaction in an iframe (e.g. the FB "like" button). Unclear how this Mozilla version stacks up.

0: https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

nickvanhoog• 8 years ago

Funny thought: Does ITP use ML to determine that googleadservices.com is a "prevalent" domain?

Vinnl3• 8 years ago

Presumably they're using the same mechanism as today, but just enabling it by default. That means it's based on the Disconnect.me blacklist: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection#w_b...

kibwen4• 8 years ago

Blocking pop-up ads in the original Firefox release was the right move in 2004, because it didn’t just make Firefox users happier, it gave the advertising platforms of the time a reason to care about their users’ experience.

Wow, I had completely forgotten about what a scourge pop-ups used to be, and what a relief it was to finally be free of them. The fact that what used to be such a prevalent scummy tactic could be completely abandoned due to pushback from browser manufacturers gives me a tiny bit of hope that maybe pervasive tracking isn't an irreparably permanent feature of the web after all.

ihuman• 8 years ago

Too bad they've now been replaced popups that occur in the same window as the website you're viewing. Is there a name for this new type of popup?

stormbrew3• 8 years ago

The real scourge at the time was actually pop-unders, which you would never figure out where they came from and saw them potentially hours after visiting the site that produced them.

It's honestly an improvement that sites have to obscure their own content (and thus spite their nose to save their face) and nothing else in order to give you intrusive ads. You'll always know what websites don't put value on their own content that way.

tempodox• 8 years ago

Overlay?

lmkg• 8 years ago

The word is "modal." Modal view, modal window, modal pop-up. Sometimes implemented by iframes, sometimes just with divs.

FactolSarin• 8 years ago

I don't think so. Maybe "modal ad"?

MagnumOpus• 8 years ago

Interstitial ads?

glitchdout• 8 years ago

Modals or modal windows.

Case in point: https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/99ljrr/research...

takeda• 8 years ago

They are bad, but because they are in the same window usually there's not as many of them as it was with popups.

dblohm7• 8 years ago

We're working on blocking those too. Feel free to install this addon to help submit data on these:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/in-page-pop-u...

ashleyn• 8 years ago

Nothing makes me want to sign up for your newsletter less than having it interrupt what I'm reading.

pwg• 8 years ago

If one browses with NoScript in default-deny mode, then many of those "popups over the content in the window" simply do not occur.

As well, when they do occur, going into Dev-Tools and deleting the <div> (or whichever element it happens to be) that is the actual popup is often sufficient to remove the popup and make the content view-able again.

michaelmrose• 8 years ago

Ublock origin has a little icon that looks like an eyedropper. You can use it to pick an element you don't want to see anymore on a website. It works on mobile too.

mderazon• 8 years ago

The ones that track your mouse and sense you're about to close the tab and then show you the pop-up are the most sleazy

manigandham• 8 years ago

The adtech terms are:

Popups/Overlays = cover your current website.

Pop-unders = open new tab with your current site, while redirecting the old tab to an ad, thereby surprising you when you close your current site.

Bounce/Exit intent = the above formats but triggered when you leave the site or close the tab.

Interstitials = the above formats but triggered when you navigate between pages, common in image galleries.

JoshMnem2• 8 years ago

You can reduce the problem by turning off CSS animation and blocking elements with Stylus[1][2]. Also turn off all CSS and JS by default and enable resources on a site-by-site basis with umatrix[3][4]. If a page isn't readable, you can turn on Firefox reader mode to format it with one click. The system works well for me.

I put this in my global Stylus rules:

    /* Remove CSS animation on all websites */
    *, *:before, *:after {
        transition-property: none !important;
        transform: none !important;
        animation: none !important;
    }

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylus/clngdbkpkpe...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/umatrix/

[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/umatrix/ogfcmafjal...

christefano• 8 years ago

Is there a name for this new type of popup?

I've heard that these are called pop-ins.

1. https://www.webfx.com/blog/marketing/non-intrusive-pop-ups/

2. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/stop-pop-ups-chrome#comme...

jdironman• 8 years ago

I call them pop-ins.

gadders• 8 years ago

I remember a prank site that you could direct people to with fake href links and it would open a couple of hundred popup windows before you could close your browser.

mirimir3• 8 years ago

Indeed. Extremely NSFW popups, as I recall :)

rasz5• 8 years ago

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/783954-8-browser-innovati...

4) Pop-up Blocking: Imagine a web experience without pop-up blocker. What we take for granted today was first introduced by Opera 5 in 2000.

madeofpalk2• 8 years ago

Extremely thankful the "Opera did it first" meme lives on.

visarga• 8 years ago

... gives me a tiny bit of hope that maybe pervasive tracking isn't an irreparably permanent feature of the web after all

I don't think you can protect yourself from tracking unless you stop using the internet and mobile phones. Wherever you have an account, a cookie, or simply make a TCP connection will be a place that can track you. Especially if they cross correlate with other tracking services.

radiorental• 8 years ago

IRL tracking is quite prevalent

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/03/revealed-faci...

And it's not just high end retailers https://twitter.com/GambleLee/status/862307447276544000/phot...

EamonnMR• 8 years ago

Now you've got full screen in-window popups, ads that move page elements around mid-scroll, auto play sidebar-when-you-scroll ads, etc.

flukus• 8 years ago

I had completely forgotten about what a scourge pop-ups used to be

Used to be? IME they still are, just not as bad as they used to be. If you go browse a few adult video sites (for science) you'll see pop-up/unders are still a thing. Even on chrome you'll see a variation of them, making the current tab the ad after the user has opened the link in a new one. Instead of webgl, webasm, etc I'd love to see a browser vendor focus on making a good browser again.

It's also hard to take their privacy promises seriously when they've got google analytics embedded in their blog.

mirimir3• 8 years ago

I agree. But then, prudent folk have GA blocked everywhere, no?

yuhong2• 8 years ago

Yes, I mentioned the history of popup blockers in my essay. It dates back to the Netscape 6/7 era.

ilovecaching• 8 years ago

What's worse, knowing you have no privacy, or having the illusion that you have privacy? Companies with deep pockets and skin in the advertising game can still track you. Anytime a defense is put up, they just pivot to another method of tracking. When you have an army of the world's best engineers and unlimited resources a way will be found. We need to start living with the reality that privacy is already dead. Weep if you will, but at least accept the truth that Mozilla can't protect you, and that your data IS out there somewhere.

alex_duf• 8 years ago

We (users) can make it easy and cheap to extract data out of us, or make it harder and more expensive.

I know which option I want

unethical_ban2• 8 years ago

No.

This is a fatalist attitude that ignores things like ethics still remaining in developers, the fact that the cat-and-mouse means the defenses ARE working, and the fact that the engineers you are so awed by aren't really magicians.

Yes, there are data breaches and tracking, and it will continue. But the fight has moral and practical value, and I appreciate Mozilla for continuing it.

msla• 8 years ago

The quickest way to defeat someone is to convince them to stop fighting.

This works especially well if the person you're convincing to give up is, at that moment, winning, or beginning to win.

mLuby• 8 years ago

I agree that this privacy/ads arms race currently favors ads, but all it takes is one law (think GDPR) to dramatically reshape the conflict. Luckily that power still resides with the users.

EGreg2• 8 years ago

“Firefox will strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content.”

This sounds ambiguous to me. Does it mean they won’t block third party cookies for NON tracking content?

We rely on third party cookies for Single Sign On auth. The question is, how will this continue to work?

Ideally, these browsers should finally allow access to client side certificates functionality so you can authenticate with websites without being tracked by the certificate’s issuer!

XAuth was a step in this direction. We need a place to store these certs or private keys. But are all major browsers even close to supporting it?

Update: Firefox supports them but it’s so clunky. Focus on letting any site install a certificate with the user’s permission, firefox!! Apple already allows web based download of configuration profiles, which is far more insecure:

https://developer.apple.com/enterprise/documentation/Configu...

https://medium.com/@sevcsik/authentication-using-https-clien...

testplzignore• 8 years ago

I think this explains which cookies would be blocked:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection#w_b...

0xmohit6• 8 years ago

  In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users
  by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of
  controls to give our users more choice over what information
  they share with sites.

Sounds promising. However, having Google as the default search engine is a good enough reason to discourage one from using Firefox. Wonder if it would ever change.

Kaveren• 8 years ago

I don't think so. The vast majority of people outside of China use Google as their search engine, and would want to continue to do so. It'd be bad UX to force them away from this.

Within a few seconds I can easily adjust my search engine preferences in the options menu, and DuckDuckGo is listed as one of the default options.

kibwen4• 8 years ago

having Google as the default search engine is a good enough reason to discourage one from using Mozilla

Hm? The only browser that doesn't ship Google as the default search engine is Edge (with apologies to Lynx users). Is the alternative to suggest that people not on Windows simply shouldn't browse the web? Changing the default takes only four clicks: search box -> change search settings -> default search engine -> select from dropdown menu.

bopbop3• 8 years ago

Honest question - What is it you are considering as the alternative browser in this situation? The other big 3rd party (non-os supplied) browser is literally made by google.

TheRealPomax5• 8 years ago

And what would you suggest as alternative, given that normal users (e.g. people who've never even heard of HN and make up the majority of browser users) expect to search with Google?

As far as I recall, the Google search is part of the funding agreement (because Mozilla is still a non-profit, the money has to come from _somewhere_ and we, the users of the browser, sure aren't paying them?) with the explicit agreement that it is trivial to change the default search engine for people who don't want to search with Google.

Click on the drop-down on the left of the search field in the browser, you click "change search settings", you pick your preferred search (options for which include "duck duck go" these days) and you're done forever. That... feels like a perfectly fine way to go about offering people what they want: make what the majority wants the default, and make it trivial to change for people with different wants or needs.

ptr_void2• 8 years ago

What about no default ? Just Prompt user after installation which search engine they want to set as default.

HN users will switch to something they prefer, normal users wouldn't know there exists anything other than google. By making what you think majority wants as default, you are forcing something on people who doesn't know any better.

0xmohit6• 8 years ago

And what would you suggest as alternative

https://duckduckgo.com/ -- The search engine that doesn't track you.

make what the majority wants the default

No. That amounts to choosing the default for the majority and diverting majority to a particular search engine.

jtmarl1n• 8 years ago

A good enough reason to discourage using Firefox in favor of what exactly? Default search provider can be changed easily enough.

0xmohit6• 8 years ago

Brave [1] uses Duckduckgo [2] as the default search engine.

[1] https://brave.com/

[2] https://duckduckgo.com/

misterbowfinger• 8 years ago

Firefox will [...] block storage access from third-party tracking content.

Is that an impact on LocalStorage?

stormbrew3• 8 years ago

I'm not entirely sure why the solution to the tracking problem isn't seen as simply scoping cookies to the domain of the top level page. I'm dubious that there's any value to cross site cookies that isn't in service of tracking, since oauth-style flows provide a better and more open mechanism for providing cross- or multi-site login mechanisms anyways.

Is there some value I'm missing? Why blacklist this? I'd rather whitelist it.

jaisfj• 8 years ago

From reading the title, I thought Mozilla were going to set telemetry, Cliqz spyware, Pocket ads, etc. as opt-in. Sad that I was wrong :(

jstanley• 8 years ago

Firefox will strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content.

I'm curious how this will work with things like Google Hosted Libraries[1] (for just one of countless examples)?

The site will stop working if you block the request, but the tracking will keep working if you don't block the request.

[1] https://developers.google.com/speed/libraries/

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

I'm curious to see how the blocking of slow-loading trackers will affect browsing ability. I put a pi-hole on my network and have found that some sites become extraordinarily slow to load (like more than 20x as slow as without the pi-hole), presumably because there's something being blocked that prevents the rest of the site from being loaded. Needless to say, this makes the pi-hole a win-some-lose-some proposition.

Hopefully Firefox's implementation will avoid this pitfall!

rasz5• 8 years ago

sounds like your setup simply blackholes instead of returning blank resources, this might lead to retries and waiting for timeouts

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

That sounds about right. Anyone have tips for how to improve performance on a pi-hole? I’ve googled but not found anything that looked spot-on.

hegz4• 8 years ago

I use umatrix and it makes things way faster. The local news website can run with 30kb of JS but without umatrix it loads 9MB

billysielu• 8 years ago

So is this "First Party Isolation on by default", or something else?

jasonkostempski2• 8 years ago

This is the wrong angle to take. Plugins are the correct solutions to these problems. A browser should implement the standards. Period. If this breaks a site users want or need, they will go to another browser. If Mozilla wants to fix things, they should be fighting for new standards. Start with a standard that says all third-party content requires a user prompt to enable, always, no whitelist, no blacklist, no way to disable the prompt. Same with all JS hardware API calls. That's how it should have been from the start. Any browser vendor that goes against the standard would be forced to admit they're enabling gapping vulnerabilities.

unethical_ban2• 8 years ago

There is no web standard for ethical tracking. Web standards are rendering video, images and text, processing JavaScript, interpreting CSS, and so on.

jasonkostempski2• 8 years ago

Maybe your right. I looked quickly but didn't find anything. Is there no standard out there stating, for example, that JavaScript MUST NOT be allowed unrestricted access to local storage or that the location API MUST request permission? These are just accepted as obvious best practices?

EastSmith• 8 years ago

What about evercookies?

Why a website needs to know what fonts I have installed?

Why a website needs to know my plugins?

Why a website need to know the gazzilion of data points tools like evercookie are uaing to fingerprint users.

I asked for a website. Just give it to me. I will render it if I can. If I can not - too bad for the website.

SquareWheel2• 8 years ago

Why a website needs to know what fonts I have installed?

So it can render the website in an appropriate font, while avoiding unnecessary network downloads.

Why a website needs to know my plugins?

Plugins used to be used for rendering applets. It made sense to see if you had Flash/Java installed before trying to insert one.

Thankfully, plugins are now going away.

hegz4• 8 years ago

You can set a list of fonts to use and the browser will keep trying until it finds one that is installed. Usually the last one in your list is serif or sans-serif that always works.

natch7• 8 years ago

They should expose the switch to turn off Javascript... this should be table stakes for any browser. Yes I realize it can be accessed by a series of steps that include leaving the page you’re on, but there is too much friction in that interaction flow.

internet_user• 8 years ago

..How can anyone protect you against html5 canvas hashes? Seems like an impossible task.

falcolas2• 8 years ago

The TOR browser simply blocks access to the canvas itself. Seems like a good addition to the "would you like to grant access to" list.

jerheinze2• 8 years ago

The patch for that has been already uplifted to Firefox and is behind the pref "privacy.resistFingerprinting": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=967895

By the way it's spelled "Tor" ;)

jerheinze2• 8 years ago

Flipping "privacy.resistFingerprinting" in about:config to true should be sufficient in recent versions (also realize that this will change your default UTC prefs, some timing prefs, default window size, and a bunch of other stuff ...etc).

BadassFractal• 8 years ago

How does Brave's approach compare to Mozilla's in this area? Are they about comparable?

zn443• 8 years ago

It’s a great initiative but I am afraid it will only change business mode of tracking providers to offer self hosted software that will no longer be 3rd party ...

dangrossman2• 8 years ago

That would achieve the stated goal of removing cross-site tracking.

zn443• 8 years ago

I imagine self hosted solution would still forward the information to the third party in the backend

belorn• 8 years ago

As someone who is continuously trying to get people to use self hosting over web services I somehow expect that will be a tough sell.

singularity20014• 8 years ago

select “Trackers (recommended)” to block cross-site tracking cookies.

What exactly is it they are blocking? Do they have a black list of sorts, or a heuristic?

besieged• 8 years ago

While I applaud this, Firefox is consistently the slowest browser or both Android and MacOS.

singularity20014• 8 years ago

Keep in mind that mozilla is financed by google.

Which means they might always find loopholes like these to track you:

https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785

Search 'telemetry' and 'tracking' under about:config .

Set all true to false where appropriate.

search for google and mozilla, remove all url entries.

or just wildcard-block them via dnsmask.

codazoda• 8 years ago

I was going to say that they aren't financed by Google, there's just a search contract, but I found this tidbit online...

"Historically, search engine royalties have been the main revenue driver for Mozilla. Back in 2014, the last year of the Google deal, that agreement brought in $323 million of the foundation’s $330 million in total revenue."

The default search contract went to Yahoo between 2014 and 2017 then back to Google after that. Looks like they do get most of their money from Google.

singularity20014• 8 years ago

thanks for confirming (and data)

herodotus2• 8 years ago

This is the control I would like (and maybe someone has tried it...): for a given URL, I control which additional URLs I permit for that page. So, for example, if I type "nytimes.com" as the top level URL, I might allow "nyt.com" as well. The GET or POST for any other URLs on that page will not be sent by my browser.

nathcd• 8 years ago

Try uMatrix! That's almost exactly what it does. Further, it lets you control requests by type, like stylesheets, images, scripts, XHRs, iframes, etc.

Its original name was HTTP Switchboard, which I thought was a great descriptor for what it does (and for its interface).

herodotus2• 8 years ago

Fabulous! And informative! Just wish there was one for Safari... Thanks for the lead.

propogandist• 8 years ago

This is exactly what uMatrix does

unwabuisi• 8 years ago

As a Web Dev I am split on a movement like this. I understand the need for users to control what data they allow companies to have on them, but if other browsers do not follow suit, what will that mean for deployment and making sites consistent across browsers? If Firefox is blocking popular libraries or scripts that end up breaking some webpages the user experience still suffers

wfleming• 8 years ago

I think that's effectively already the world we live in. As a uBlock user I occasionally run into sites that are broken because they wrote code assuming that some function provided by an analytics library would exist, and it doesn't because that library got blocked. I file bug reports when I can, and I'm concientous about handling these cases in my own code.

Writing code to handle the failure to load of third party scripts like this should really be a best practice anyway. Even if you use subresource integrity checks on all the external scripts you load, what if some analytics provider's site is down for a while? Do you want your site to still work? I do. (Obviously this does not apply to scripts that are actually necessary for the core functionality of your site, but that doesn't really apply to analytics/tracking tools for the most part.)

Making this the default behavior of FF will make this sort of breakage more visible to more people, it's true. If anything maybe this will encourage sites to write their code to handle failure more elegantly and I'll spend less time annoyed. One can dream.

hegz4• 8 years ago

Site owners were given freedom for a long time and they consistently chose to do the wrong things with no sign of ever stopping. Now browsers have to step in and moderate them.

interatx• 8 years ago

Maybe I missed in the article but how does a browser block cryptomining scripts? Same goes for fingerprints.

groovecoder• 8 years ago

There are known trackers involved with non-consensual crypto-jacking, and fingerprinting. Those domains can be blocked completely.

ssothrowaway• 8 years ago

So if our SaaS service uses third-party cookies to do single sign-on, what does this mean for us? Can we apply for some kind of whitelist somewhere, or do we need to rethink how our entire product works? We aren't using third-party cookies for advertising purposes.

throwawaysso• 8 years ago

So if our SaaS service relies heavily on third-party cookies for single sign-on, how does this impact us? Is there some kind of whitelist we need to apply for, or do we need to completely rethink our product?

HIPisTheAnswer2• 8 years ago

Turn off JS - Done!

euske• 8 years ago

Dear Mozilla: I hope your browser have all the internal data flows accounted, i.e. how much of your cookie, location, keystrokes, files goes to each site should be presented to a user. This can be complicated due to cross-site login credentials and whatnot, but it can be visualized nicely in a graph format. This would probably require engine-related changes and affect the performance, but definitely a direction I'd like to see in future.

QuadrupleA• 8 years ago

Shameless plug - for browsers that don't yet block trackers, I have a little social sharing buttons project that cuts out all the usual cookie and http-request garbage you usually get from social icons:

https://github.com/QuadrupleA/private-secure-sharing-buttons

auslander3• 8 years ago

Right thing, but why it took that long? Safari made ITP enabled by default year ago, and upgraded it to ITP 2.

https://webkit.org/blog/8311/intelligent-tracking-prevention...

iamleppert• 8 years ago

What's going to happen is they will just change their code to use postMessage or similar to facilitate the tracking. It's really not hard to persist a UUID across many different TLD's using techniques other than tracking cookies.

I'm sorry but this isn't going to help motivated companies who have businesses and teams of engineers. It's just going to be some JIRA ticket that says "fix tracking for firefox users".

KajMagnus2• 8 years ago

I'm developing an embedded commenting system that runs in an iframe. Each blog has cookies at `blog-name.example.com` and one gets different cookies at different blogs — there's no tracking.

Still Privacy Badger and apparently iPhone believes the cookies are tracking cookies. Privacy Badger doesn't see the difference between unique cannot-track cookies on `per-blog-sub-domain.example.com` and tracking cookies on `example.com`.

If you have time: How will the new Firefox browser deal with such cookies? (unique per blog cookies, different on each subdomain)

Maybe I'll have to make the commenting system work completely without cookies in any case, because of iPhone and Privacy Badger.

Changing Our Approach to Anti-Tracking

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