this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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66
What is Firefox supposed to do? (www.spacebar.news)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Does anyone know if the PPA/Personal Pan Pizza Privacy/Whatever thing has an about:config entry or is it controlled from about:preferences#privacy?

EDIT: To answer my own question, the about:config entry is "dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled" which should be set to "false"; for those of us who use arkenfox, you should add this to your user-overrides.js file and then run the updater:

user_pref("dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled", false); // Disable Privacy-Preserving Attribution

This is correct AFAICT.

EDIT EDIT: Also, possibly naive question: Why can't Mozilla/Firefox just ask for donations like Wikipedia does instead of sneaking around, which they sort of seem to do once in a while?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

PPA/Personal Pan Pizza Privacy

Mmmm digital personal pan pizza 🤤

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)
  1. PPA doesn't make Mozilla money.
  2. Firefox is developed by Mozilla Corp, which can't take donations. Mozilla Foundation does do fundraising drives, but that's mostly for their public advocacy (which, ironically, may be where the idea for PPA originated).
  3. PPA has a checkbox in about:preferences.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

  1. Ok (um, then they do it why?) My attention has been really divided for the past couple days, so I haven't really read very deeply into PPA.

  2. Didn't know that; maybe they should reconfigure themselves to be more like Wikipedia? 🤷 It seems like Wikipedia has way more users than FF, and they're able to keep going on the small donations they request from time to time.

  3. Indeed it does! And it might be nice if it wasn't checked by default like it was in mine, but ok, I guess.

Also, what have hamsters ever done to you? 😉

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

The support article explains the rationale.

Unchecked by default would render the experiment useless.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't remember who I heard say it, but someone said Mozilla should have built a privacy-first Google ecosystem alternative similar to what Proton are doing, which could have allowed them to actually make some money outside of their Google search bribe money.

But it's too late for that now I guess :(

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Interestingly, the most voted for new service by Proton users in the 2024 community survey was a privacy-focused web browser. I wonder if we will see Proton move into that space soon.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

you cannot be privacy focused while being a for profit corporation

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago

Good thing Proton is a nonprofit then 😊

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Come again?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Wait was it privacy or was it having an intrusive "ai" bullshit thing? I can't remember exactly Jokes aside, proton is not something we should look up to. Blender is a great example of a thing where various people contribute and somehow nobody needs to suck off facebook, the thing works and is getting better, usually listens to their community, there is no bullshit corporate structure and a ceo that needs his parachute gilded etc

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The private AI writing assistant is a feature recently announced for Proton Mail. A browser would be an entirely new service.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, but we're talking trust here. Why should they do privacy if they already give your data to some llm thing?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Did you even bother to read about how it works or did you just skip straight to the hysteria? Proton Scribe runs locally on the device and it does not use your inputs for training. No data is sent to the cloud or third-parties.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

No, the point is in having a for profit org and something like the blender foundation. It's about trust, not just the crappy llm thing, about the thing where they say everybody wants this

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Proton do appear to be trying to resolve some of the issues that come with being a for-profit company?

Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It's one of those things where you talk about them once they are done. I'm transitioning to quitting smoking

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Unless you're using a non-Chromium browser, that is.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

In which case it runs on no-log servers. Support is coming for other browsers and the Proton Mail desktop app is already supported on macOS. Of course, all of this ignores the even greater point that this is an entirely optional feature that no one has to use. Personally I will be ignoring it completely.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I dunno.

I'm kind of enjoying watching Firefox users have to eat a little crow, since they troll the shit out of me every time I talk about Brave.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago

This really doesn’t make Brave look any better though, seeing as it has its own version of “privacy-focused” attention-monetization schemes (Basic Attention Tokens) and its own fair share of controversies. Not to mention being Chromium under the hood and being developed by a company headed by Brandon Eich of all people — a massive homophobe.

None of which make Firefox impeccable or ever did. But all of which made Brave decidedly worse to me, including after this all happened.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The usual pro-advertising take. "It's ok that we're going to experiment without your consent on how to manipulate you, because we only use aggregated data so it's not personal, it's business."

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Let's say Firefox went full privacy absolutist, with all tracking and advertising networks blocked by default. That would probably be the best user experience initially, but websites wouldn't make any money from visitors outside of subscriptions, direct donations, or (if they can sell them) direct advertising. It would probably just encourage more sites to stop supporting Firefox completely, which is already enough of a problem that Mozilla maintains a list of hacks to make sites work properly in Firefox. Mozilla removing all analytics from Firefox itself would also make fixing bugs and prioritizing development more difficult.

Idk my read is that every browser has to do this a little bit, or else websites will stop devoting resources to supporting that browser. Firefox's solution seems pretty reasonable when you take that into consideration. And Firefox still isn't trying to stop you from installing 20 privacy add-ons and nuking anything that even whiffs of an ad.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

It's possible FF wouldn't get away with something like integrating ad blocking by default, but in no reasonable universe were they required to do the PPA stuff and turn it on by default. Nor is it clear that it will lead to websites caring about FF compatibility--unfortunately many already don't.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

This is the best take I've seen on the whole kerfuffle so far.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago

I do know that Mozilla's Privacy Preserving Attribution is not something you should worry about. I also know if someone calls it the "enshitification of Firefox" or the work of an "anti-privacy, pro-advertising cabal," they're either ignorant or simply looking for rage bait clicks from angry Linux users.

Yup

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Mozilla, please refocus the resources to improve performance, or let FF disappear!

This whole thing with the private data collection is meaningless, if the browser is increasingly niche.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Firefox is faster than Chromium in many benchmarks, depending on the OS: https://arewefastyet.com/win10/benchmarks/overview?numDays=60

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

My experience is that Firefox often has problems on Google-owned properties. Either performance/responsiveness or functionality just not working. Why this would be is left as an exercise for the reader.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Thank you for the hard numbers.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 month ago

Performance? FF is faster than chrome. What are you talking about.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What performance issues do you have with Fx? I use it daily and don't really feel like it's slower than Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Unfortunately, Firefox is not as efficient as Chrome. On a battery powered devices this matters. Also it doesn't have a native dark mode for web content.
I'm this close to jumping the ship.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Firefox is the only mobile browser I am aware of that allows extensions (including adblockers), and this let's the user add functionality like having dark mode everywhere, even on sites that normally wouldn't allow it.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Were having radically different experiences. Firefox consumes way less power than chrome on all my machines

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Chrome needs to be reinstalled every once in a while for some reason, or it will underperform.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

It drains battery on fresh installs for me. I just don't bother. I don't really see the appeal of chrome tbh. Obviously I have to use it occasionally since google content locks shit and so do employers, but there's like... No real reason I'd use it as a daily driver. For my use cases and hardware its just plain worse

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Ditto

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Ahh, I see. I'm usually on desktop PCs and use solar power at home, so the efficiency is less of a concern.

AFAIK the "auto dark mode" in Chrome is experimental and doesn't work well on all sites. Have you tried Dark Reader on Firefox? More and more sites are adding native dark mode, too.