Today in tortured tech analogies: Mozilla lets Firefox loose in the hen house, and by hen house, we mean the tracking cookie jar, er... Mozilla has declared that its latest Firefox browser will no longer allow third-party tracking cookies by default, pushing an existing limited-audience feature to all users. The so-called Enhanced Tracking Protection feature is being built into version 69 of the browser. It more or less implements an age-old feature of browser …
Everyday browsing/email/RSS/Usenet is Seamonkey here.
Palemoon set slightly less tied down than the Seamonkey installation for a few sites.
Waterfox even less tied down for less friendly sites but with data cleared at close-down. Cookies? Don't care, they'll be gone. FIngerprinting? Don't care, I'll likely not be back.
ISTR taking a look at Chromium some time ago but didn't bother with it.
Yeah, if you're only just hitting 50 I can see why you think it was telnet. Try morse.
Try signalling with a Japanese war fan. Much earlier than morse.
I hit 50 ::mumble:: years ago, I was clearly talking about telnet. I thought we were talking about TehIntraWebTubes, mayhap I was wrong? And what does that have to do with Morse?
If you want to discuss store-and-forward networks, we'll have to go back to before the Fall of Troy. (If you don't have a classical education, read Aeschylus' Agamemnon, paying close attention as to how Clytemnestra got word of her husband's victory overnight from an as-the-crow-flys distance of 400km/250mi. The technology was already ancient by that time.)
You'll take my Firefox when you pry it from my cold dead fingers! ;-)
I'm a greybeard - first browser I used was Mosaic, then through Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox
Comes down to a matter of trust - Firefox 8 v Chrome 1. Do I want my browser tied to an advertising platform with murky privacy settings or a somewhat independent software producer?
I uninstall Chrome when another application install pushes it (happens a lot these days, without them asking first) and haven't touched IE (any version) for over a decade.
My one grouch is they keep effing about with what functions are supported userChrome.css.
Just installed (then uninstalled) v69 - and yes: my tabs moved yet again to the top instead of the bottom.
They seem to be on a messianic mission here - it's against God and nature to have the tabs at the bottom just above the page!
I'll reinstall when I find the latest fix for tabs on bottom.
My one grouch is they keep effing about with what functions are supported userChrome.css.Is this a case of them not supporting them or it nor even reading your userChrome.css file as per the release notes? (I'm not saying this is the issue, it's just something I noticed in the release notes that may be a source of your issues)
Firefox no longer loads userChrome.css or userContent.css by default improving start-up performance. Users who wish to customize Firefox by using these files can set the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference to true to restore this ability.
Firefox no longer loads userChrome.css or userContent.css by default improving start-up performance.
Yes, got caught by that one. Two hours of irritation while dealing with a more significant problem (other half's Mac Mini suddenly refusing to talk to HDMI) then a quick search followed by a flag toggle to get back to sanity.
Quite like the Brave Browser.
It's got an ad-blocker, cookie control and it syncs across my various Android and other Windows computers.
It certainly loads pages very fast.
Based on Chromium, I can choose from a heck of extensions if need be.
I suggest people give it a look.
www.brave.com
"Quite like the Brave Browser.
"It's got an ad-blocker, cookie control and it syncs across my various Android and other Windows computers."
Sorry: https://brave.com/brave-ads-waitlist/
"Brave uses local machine learning with the browser profile to only place ads in optimal conditions. Ads are matched to opportunities, and users become partners instead of targets."
I only use it for websites that require flash, since it has a built-in version that doesn't crash as often as the add-on. Fortunately, those are slowly disappearing - and chrome can go with them.
Never liked it with it's awkward non-theme-respecting menus and space-wasting permanent tabs. Was upset when firefox pointlessly copied it. But pale moon is still fine.
WTF. It's already there!
Edit->Preferences->Privacy
Select "Firefox will use custom settings for history" then "Accept third-party cookies: Always/From Visited/Never"
This is in FF 43.0.4, the last version before they removed fine-grained cookie control. So they apparently took the shit out, and put it back in, to rounds of applause for being such a wonderful browser maker??
Perhaps this explains why "Firefox has long since passed its glory days when it was a real player in the browser wars"
WTF. It's already there!
Difference is, by default it's set to "always" in the past. Not it's set to "Never" (I guess. Dropped FF when they dropped support for my preferred addons, now use Waterfox and sometimes Pale Moon (the latter had some odd issues with a few sites I was a regular at)
The story doesn't explain it very well, but I think this feature is rather more fine-grained than just 'accept all third party cookies' or 'deny all third-party cookies'. It attempts to identify 'bad' third-party cookies and block those, while allowing 'good' or at least 'not obviously awful' ones, I guess.
"The story doesn't explain it very well, but I think this feature is rather more fine-grained than just 'accept all third party cookies' or 'deny all third-party cookies'. It attempts to identify 'bad' third-party cookies and block those, while allowing 'good' or at least 'not obviously awful' ones, I guess."
More specifically, the default is now that it will block all third party cookies as listed by Disconnect.me, and you can choose between the less strict level 1 list or the more comprehensive level 2 list. If that's not enough for you, you can block all third party cookies, or all cookies. Or none. Or define your own black and/or white lists. It's about as fine-grained as you could want it, and I don't believe that's changed for a good few versions*; the only news here is that the default setting has been changed.
* I have version 53 on an old offline machine, and that doesn't have any options related to cookies at all, so Gene Cash appears to be correct that they did remove these options at one point. It's much better now though, starting with version 63 according to the help page.
See title.
My math isn't the greatest but two thirds of a hundred would be 66.66... the remainder of that would be 33. That's not single digits, and I strongly doubt that IE has anywhere near that high of a marketshare except in corporate environments where crappy halfbaked enterprise software still requires it.
Just sayin'
Frankly, I'm surprised Safari is so low, as it's the default on iPhones. On the other hand, Chrome figures are for both mobile & PC
No, the figures for Chrome (66.93%) are for Desktop/Laptop machines only. You can change the machine type to Mobile, and see that again Chrome has a high share (63.74%), however in that instance Safari has almost 27%.
"Doesn't netmarketshare use advertising data to calculate the ratios of browsers? Assuming that most FF users also install NoScript that might explain why the FF figures are so low?"
Yes. Only actual reason to use FF is to *disable ads* and TheRegister dropped to that trap head-on: Ad-site would never know about most FF users.
... except that the big players in the unauthenticated part of the Web (of which there is a whole one, compared to a one in the authenticated part - you've guessed the names all right) don't need any cookies anymore. Given they own pretty much all of the infrastructure (other people's OS's and websites, in other words) and the cheapness of behavioral fingerprinting, they actually don't need the feared browser fingerprinting either.
The whole fight against tracking cookies reminds me of the famous React OS in which we can now reliably run mspaint.exe from Windows 98 to avoid the licensing and slurping woes of Windows 10. Well meant, and big kudos from me to all the people who made this possible (often in their leisure time), since it shows that there are still people who do care. But it is important nevertheless to stay current and understand that the big bags of sweet sweet dollars have already moved elsewhere some time ago.
Google's dominance is not due to a superior browser, but to underhanded tactics.
A large proportion of the worlds PC users can barely manage to switch their machines on; and they use whatever came pre-installed.
Then Google comes along, with its cohorts silently installing Chrome in parallel to updates of certain infamous software packages (looking at you Adobe); and setting it as the default browser.
Suddenly the users are faced with a new layout; but have no idea what has happened, or how to revert - so just make the best of it and carry on.
The glut of Chrome mobile users has been relatively new one, as Chrome suddenly started appearing as the default browser across a wide range of Android phones only about 2-3 years ago - and you are unable to delete it!!
Worse, several other system apps are hard-wired to use it, so even if you install a different browser, those apps will bypass it and use Chrome.
Yes, but I only use it for certain things, none of which are personally identifiable or use logins.
There have been quite a lot of threads etc around the net about the Chinese purchase, particularly the built-in VPN, so I certainly wouldn't use it for banking or anything like that.
Not to mention pushing it on one through their search site. Always popping up messages trying to get one to switch to chrome (do they still do that? I don't use google search much anymore). Those same users you mention who can barely turn on a machine will get that message and obey it since it came from the google search page.
So they keep saying. TBH, I've never seen anything even remotely "targeted" aside from the Amazon "people who bought that, bought this" stuff. Even the side ads that stalk you after you've bought something are crude devices. I bought what I want, I don't want another - go away.
So, who is collecting these data, and to what purpose...?
My wife had a similar problem. She had to temporarily drop the blocks in order to view a client's facebook page (or instagram, or whatever it was), along with associated youtube stuff. After viewing it, she forgot to turn the blocks back on, and went looking for who had her favorite "work" bras on sale.
She remembered to turn the blocks back on after a couple minutes, maybe five, probably after looking at eight or ten pages. But the rot had already set in. For MONTHS afterwards, the bright sparks at advertising agencies across the planet decided she needed to see bra adverts whenever possible. It was surreal, she'd look up horse blankets or forklift parts or muck forks and get bra adverts ...
I wonder how much longer the ad-pushers are going to be able to carry on their con? P.T. Barnum lived a century or so too early ...
I'm a huge fan of Firefox. Unfortunately, from my perspective, 69.0 is less secure than 68.0.2. This is due to the fact per-domain cookie settings are broken when first party isolation is enabled. Hopefully the regression (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1556212) gets fixed ASAP.
"Firefox has long since passed its glory days when it was a real player in the browser wars: Google’s Chromium platform has won that war,"
This is kind of bullshit as chromium is the default on phones and there are so many phones. Browsing in phone is horrible though and I'd never install Google spyware, i.e. Chromium, into my computer.
it's literally data slurping tool disguised as browser. No-one who actually cares about privacy is using it.
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