Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
maybe it's because I've been using nightly for some time now, but these aren't new, right? that said, you can (and probably should) turn these off; for each new system I provision with Firefox as the browser, I run through a check list of toggles / flags to turn on and off.
Alternatively, there are several forks of Firefox that are preconfigured to be more private out of the box
Yeah, this is ancient news and takes all of 8 seconds to permanently disable.
Or you can just switch to LibreWolf and get no ads and no tracking, the way Mozilla was supposed to be
firefox extensions still work fine?
Most of them.
LibreWolf is literally just the FireFox build, with the telemetry & adware ripped out, and ublock origin and similar preinstalled. (I suspect people that downvoted me above assume I am shilling some commercial browser and just don't know what LW is)
I ran into a problem with Video Download Helper, it installs a co-app that had "~/.firefox" hardcoded in a script. I changed that to point to LibreWolf and it worked.
I suspect people that downvoted me above assume I am shilling some commercial browser and just don’t know what LW is
lol no
Perhaps, one day, someone will talk about "the people that downvoted me" without sounding like a total goober. But that day is not today.
aah, a good old load-bearing "just" with all the trimmings
love it when a post tells you how much experience someone has in large-scale software and systems management (and thus also how seriously to take their advice)
Mind sharing said list?
I'll see if I can export all modified flags but generally skim through about:config for references to "reporting", "telemetry", "pocket", "browser.ml".
On desktops I also like to enable UI density == 1.
In the settings GUI I generally disable sponsored links, autoplay stuff, studies and recommendations.
prior to anything, I install ublock origin and enable its use in private browsing.
Edit: if you use regular firefox for android (not beta, nor nightly), you can access about:config via chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml
That is helpful! Thanks!
Hey no prob - I've swept through a new install of nightly on another system to get a concise set of ideas together (personal preference / UX tweaks have a † prepended):
#GUI configs:
about:preferences#general
about:preferences#home
about:preferences#search
about:preferences#privacy
uncheck Send technical and interaction data to Mozilla (I don't usually offer my information as my behaviour is a poor representation of end users)
uncheck Allow personalized extension recommendations (disabled with the above)
uncheck Install and run studies (disabled with the above)
uncheck Send daily usage ping to Mozilla
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/
(install ublock origin and allow its use in provate browsing)
[right click and customise toolbar]:
#about:config
falsify the following:
Dang, that is a thorough list! Thanks a lot!
very welcome - happy browsing!
You don't have a script for all the stuff you toggle, do you?
No, this is something i should have, particularly given how many systems I provision in general. I'll see if I can put one together when I have some time.
Counterpoint - these are literally least intrusive ads possible and Firefox gets a few pennies from me leaving it active so that I can enjoy the product for free. And this is coming from someone whose run ublock origin for over a decade on every PC I own, and has installed an alternative YouTube frontend on my TV because fuck ads.
Counterpoint
ew
these are literally least intrusive ads possible and Firefox gets a few pennies from me leaving it active so that I can enjoy the product for free
mozilla has alienated a large number of its supporters by going all-in on LLM horseshit in their browser and anywhere else (MDN) they can shove it, exploitative crap (especially directed inwards towards its own developers, go find some ex-Mozilla postmorts if you want to see some of the nicest people you know get curbstomped by awful management and then fired), and doing a ton of other semi-to-fully fraudulent nonprofit boondoggle shit. they’ve made it clear they don’t want our donations (and plenty of people were donating more than just a few pennies from ads) and they really don’t deserve your advocacy. all Mozilla as a company cares about is the funding they get from Google. everything else is just layered affinity grifts.
what browser do you recommend then
none. we fucked it. once Mozilla dies, and they will die, none of the Gecko forks are realistically in shape to take on browser development on their own. chromium will be the only game in town, and google will use their dominant position to push through crap like browser attestation to secure their deathgrip on the web. ladybird is unserious fascist shit. chromium forks solve nothing. everything else is targeting an early 2000s version of the web’s features, which is good for them.
the only way I can see out of the above is Servo, the ex-Mozilla browser engine that Mozilla did their best to bury after Firefox Quantum, and they’re starved for cash and developers. I’d love if Servo was a workable browser today, but it just isn’t. it’ll take a lot more than a couple of pennies in some grifter’s pocket and the laziest possible advocacy to get it there.
We won't have any usable web browsers, but that's OK, because there won't be a web worth browsing.
Been this way for a while now. I turn that shit off every time I do a new install.
Stuff like this has been coming for a while now, and I hate it. See also how your windows login screen can have ads on it.
Considering the rate of return on advertisements, I don't think this is a financially good sign.
And interestingly a friend of mine who basically only games switched to Linux, and it seemed to have been rather painless. And most of his games work with minimal fiddling. (And there are even tools to help you with 'which games of my library will not run well'. Which did surprisingly well on his large library. So linux on the desktop might be closer than we think).
It's unfortunate that Linux is not immune to this. I noticed this happening to Firefox on a Linux machine and there was the debacle with Amazon search in Ubuntu's menu about a decade ago. It seems a lot less endemic, though.
I'd hope that on linux annoyed users would easily hack it out, compared to stuff like windows. But sadly that is also expecting active users who can do coding and then can/want to spread that code, and then being able to trust that code. I have seen in other places how much of a mess that can be.
There certainly are users, both on Windows and Linux who do "hack out" these things. With Firefox it can range from just going through the small hassle of unticking the sponsor option in settings to making forks like the LibreWolf which people seem to like. When the Ubuntu Amazon thing was ongoing I recall people switching desktop environments and even distros in protest and for Windows I know people who hunt elusive enterprise only versions or even Chinese market editions of the OS to avoid the ads.
I usually appreciate it when distros avoid fucking with the upstream versions of the software they package, so in the occasional case like this where the upstream decides to ship a shitty "feature" I would actually prefer being patched out by the distro package maintainers, I don't mind accepting the responsibility of just turning off the setting or compiling a fork on my own if necessary.
Linux gaming has come a really long way. I use Bazzite^[https://bazzite.gg/] on a Steam Deck and it's great.
The only real remaining hurdle, I think, is that some companies insist on anti-cheat software without Linux support. Mostly because they're too lazy to implement it server-side, I am guessing. This is why you can't play Fortnite (that one with the dancing and the bullets) on Linux.
You can't prevent client-side cheating with a server-side implementation. For instance, making enemies on the other side of a wall visible uses data that the server has to supply to the client in order for the game to work, just in an unintended way. The server also has no way to verify whether the client is accurately conveying the results of user inputs or gently correcting them to move the aim to an enemy's head instead of a gazebo.
It would still be nice if all game companies supported Linux, but it requires active effort and isn't something they can get for free by being better programmers.
the annoying thing is that anticheat engines do support linux, but some companies don't want to deal with it at all
Server can absolutely prevent wall hacks. It just adds a lot of computation cost and induces more latency.
I have stock firefox on mac and the first 2 tiles on the new tab are sponsored
Same for me on Linux.
I don't want to validate their decision but this isn't new
I only saw it today and the article was updated four days ago, so something probably did change quite recently. Also, this is not a news site and you can post things that are not new if they seem of interest.
yeah, it’s weird how many of our visitors came here thinking TechTakes is a news sub