Firefox and Fastly take another step toward a privacy upgrade for the internet

https://www.fastly.com/blog/firefox-fastly-take-another-step-toward-security-upgrade

74 32 3 years ago

ugjka• 3 years ago

Now just do native vertical tabs and I'll have 0 problems with FF

jwells89• 3 years ago

I’d settle for being able to turn off the unreasonably huge pane header that comes with extensions that implement vertical tabs via the sidebar.

Yes it can be hidden with userchrome mods, but it shouldn’t be necessary to resort to that, plus we don’t know how long userchrome mods will continue to work…

nickthegreek• 3 years ago

It took me a decent amount of work to finally get my sidebery visually config’d in a way that I found acceptable. I haven’t worked that hard on setting up an extension in a long time!

asadotzler• 3 years ago

A little bit of userchrome.css magic fixes this. I use treestyle tabs and for mine I simply added:

#TabsToolbar {visibility: collapse;} #sidebar-header {visibility:collapse;}

SadTrombone• 3 years ago

Native would be great, but for my use case the Tab Center Reborn extension for Firefox is the best implementation of vertical tabs I've used on any browser, native or otherwise. There's other extensions like Sidebery and Tree Style Tabs, but I haven't really tried them.

2malaq• 3 years ago

So you think TCR is the best one, but you haven't really tried the other ones? How can you know?

90-00-09• 3 years ago

Apparently Mozilla is working on that for over a year now (announced in Feb '22).

7e• 3 years ago

How does this compare to Apple Private Relay?

stranded22• 3 years ago

I was thinking exactly the same…

tadpole172• 3 years ago

Apple private relay uses Fastly as one of the providers so I wouldn't be surprised if this is implemented the same way.

kalupa• 3 years ago

would that be true for providers that aren't Fastly? why would there be a different implementation for non-fastly? or are they the sole providers for private relay?

skuhn7• 3 years ago

These services are implemented in different parts of Fastly's production stack, but they share the same global infrastructure footprint and a lot of the same people/teams are involved with both.

skuhn7• 3 years ago

This service with Mozilla utilizes OHTTP, whereas iCloud Private Relay uses MASQUE.

OHTTP is ideally suited for privacy enablement of APIs, whereas MASQUE is more for general purpose traffic.

OHTTP has similarities to MASQUE in that it uses a two hop proxy design where each proxy only knows part of the total requestor / request information. And in both cases these proxies must be operated by separate entities that do not collude.

However, the key difference is that in OHTTP the end destination is known, because there is a 1-1-1 mapping between OHTTP Relay -> OHTTP Gateway -> Target. This could become more generalized in future revisions to OHTTP, but right now it's all hardcoded behavior.

For more about OHTTP at Fastly, I wrote a blog post a while back at [1]. There is also the IETF draft spec at [2].

[1] https://www.fastly.com/blog/enabling-privacy-on-the-internet...

[2] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-ohai-ohttp

TradingPlaces3• 3 years ago

However, the key difference is that in OHTTP the end destination is known, because there is a 1-1-1 mapping between OHTTP Relay -> OHTTP Gateway -> Target. This could become more generalized in future revisions to OHTTP, but right now it's all hardcoded behavior.

So the Relay knows the requested URL? That’s not masked by the client?

yawnbox• 3 years ago

Mozilla and The Tor Project have been collaborating for years. Mozilla does not have the backbone to implement Tor Browser as Private Browser mode in Firefox. Do better, Mozilla.

smegsicle• 3 years ago

brave did what mozillouldnt

hakfoo• 3 years ago

There's a reasonable case that Private Browsing and Tor serve different enough use cases that they're not interchangeable.

Private Browsing: The goal is to prevent embarrassment. I'm looking at porn or shopping for gifts for my spouse, and I don't want it showing up in the autocomplete/history/remarketing ads as much as possible.

Tor: The goal is to prevent imprisonment. I'm accessing stuff that's politically sensitive and either inaccessible or likely to trigger consequences if it's detected by local ISP infrastructure.

Obviously, Tor offers a higher overall security profile, but tends to break things (services using IP blacklists, services that don't do well with its performance characteristics, etc.) that people expect to work with today's Private Browsing.

ISTR when one implementation of it came out (not sure if it was Firefox's or the original Chrome Incongito mode) the launch page said point blank "this will not hide your movements from your ISP, governments, site hosts, etc."

autoexec• 3 years ago

Missing from this article is: How do I disable this.

My initial thoughts are: I don't have any reason to trust fastly or their motivations. I certainly don't have any desire to use them as a proxy server for all of my HTTP traffic.

I'll review the OHTTP spec carefully, which seems to have been put forward by mozilla (who I have limited faith in) and Cloudflare (whose motivations are suspect), and evaluate this in depth, but for now I just don't want to worry that a browser update is going to cause firefox to start sending my data to a third party.

If the concern is that websites know what our IP is due to HTTP requests, we already have some solutions for that, a VPN being a good one. Mozilla already offers a VPN.

skuhn7• 3 years ago

Without going into trust / motivation / etc. of various organizations, OHTTP is not used for general purpose web browsing. This Fastly service is used by Mozilla in conjunction with their own origins, not to random origins on the Internet.

captn3m0• 3 years ago

Sadly neither the Fastly nor the Mozilla blog clearly states this out, or lists down the origins/services for which this is enabled.

zeroentropy2• 3 years ago

OHTTP is designed for low latency or lightweight applications. A VPN (or MASQUE, to later comments) requires that you do two handshakes before making a request: one with the VPN and one with the server you want to talk to. OHTTP does away with the second and, where where you are making multiple requests, lets the first handshake only occur once (a VPN/MASQUE can do this too).

Now, this has very little to do with what you might trust Firefox or Mozilla to do. OHTTP only provides a degree of anonymity. If you don't want to share the data that is carried in the message, then you might want to disable the request, not the privacy protections that OHTTP provides. Firefox will use OHTTP for different purposes, so you need to look at each in turn.

thesorrow• 3 years ago

You can disable the configuration in the `network.trr.use_ohttp` field. It's already disabled on my Firefox 118.0.1 (NixOS 23.05)

ameyv• 3 years ago

So correct me if i'm wrong, this mean that it basically is man in middle relay sitting between you and resource you are trying to access, and knows things you want. Basically an aggregator of data under guise of privacy.

AdmiralAsshat• 3 years ago

Damn, I misread Fastly as Fastmail and thought Mozilla had partnered with them too provide a paid email-hosting service.

Firefox and Fastly take another step toward a privacy upgrade for the internet

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