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How do we curtail global warming and consumption while still allowing advertising to steal our attention?
b) this is just the tip of the camel's nose. Expect the tent to be crowded soon if the topics api gets pushed through
c) third party cookies are dying on their own, thankfully. It's not a binary choice, we can reject both the old bad technology and the new bad technology
Better than? As in replacing? I honestly highly doubt that will ever happen, this is just additional. Advertisement & tracking have become the single most dangerous device to target specific users with malware, and this just adds more layers of assurance that you’ve found your target.
This is tracking that’s baked right into the browser. There is very little limit to what data it can use to generate whatever information it does, and it follows you across the internet for perpetuity. It’s also a first party implementation so you’re completely beholden to Google’s decision to do what they want with it, and considering the IE like chokehold Chromium has on internet browsing, most people will be subject to whatever Google decides to do.
Finally, your steps only tell me what Google is telling others. It tells me nothing about what data the browser itself might be collecting and passing onto Google.
There is a substantial qualitative difference between a 3rd party tool that can easily be blocked by the first party vendor (the browser) and or modifications to it using extensions, and a first party tool doing the tracking itself.
I don't need to actually try something like this to know that I don't want my privacy to be violated by it.
And there is always someone willing to fill your spot.
The whole point of privacy sandbox is to reduce privacy invasions.
There exists a problem on the web where anonymous visitors are being served unrelevant ads. That provides a bad experience to visitors and reduces the amount of money websites can make.
There should be an API that makes a compromise between privacy and utility so that users can get a better experience anonymously visitable websites.
The absense of such an API for this will strengthen walled gardens and disincentivize users from visiting them and site operators from making them.
That’s a nice fantasy, but the number of ad-blocking users and ratio of advertising revenue on mobile (where adblocking is harder) vs PC suggests to me that the content of ads doesn’t affect user experience nearly as much as the quantity and intrusiveness of ads. I think the second part of your sentence is the real problem being addressed, nothing about advertising is actually designed to directly benefit consumers. I think you would be hard-pressed to find people who actually factor ad relevance into their enjoyment of an ad-supported product.
People don't like seeing their "interests" follow them around into unrelated content. That's my anecdotal observation anyway.
If browsers had a "provide us some preferences to customize advertising" flow in their onboarding, users would feel in control, and the data might be of high quality. Ideally, you'd have some compartmentalization options (don't show community X my interest in product Y). That's completely infeasible now: there's such a hostility and adversarial relationship with customers, that any data provided through a voluntary, opt-in process would be seen as suspect from day 1. Not without reason-- users would be prone to select garbage in the attempt to reduce ad load or cause undue cost to advertisers. Even if the users played along, would also likely be hijacked by self-serving technology players-- would there be an interoperable way to probe customer preferences, or would they be aggregated by, and only available on, specific platforms?
Since the industry has already destroyed any trust and quality relationship between users and advertisers, AdTech has to resort to continuing to poison the ecosystem through constant surveilance to retrieve "more reliable" data than asking customers what ads they might care about.
There's a potential to claim some subtext in user activity that would reveal preferences the customers won't manually disclose, but that's also the exact that the surveilance practices cross from useful to creepy.
No, the problem is that ads shouldn't exist at all. Ad companies like GOOG should just die.
I don't think that's actually a problem for anybody but the advertisers, and screw them.
Spoke directly to the devs, and they are aware of the one specific method which nullifies Firefox's use. They are working to eliminate the use of that one method, so at least they are not complacent with just accepting Chrome or bust.
Unless this is a very low level package, I find it hard to believe it just doesn't work with Firefox in 2023, at least if we are referring to the basic browser APIs for rendering, interpreting, sandboxing, etc.
In other words, if they aren't doing something systems level that exposes significant differences in the underlying browser APIs, then what's the cause of the issue?
Most application level differences (with the exception of the adware) are very very minor. That didn't used to be the case, but it certainly is today. I.e. you would have to put some effort in/intentionality is usually required to break something in Chrome but not Firefox and vice versa as a standard user program. Its not recommended, but I rarely see front end folks doing the same kind of browser tests that used to be industry standard these days, because it simply isn't an issue and if it is, it's because you are knowingly using a non-standard feature (which is usually adware related). The fact that they figured out the cause so quickly implies it's something like that. Systems level issues would require significant time to investigate and probably the involvement of experts in modern browser implementations.
Just my two cents as an ex front end guy.
I am used to accessing my Chase bank account through Firefox. I just checked, and I am still able to log in fine, including with a variety of privacy-enhancing extensions that break many other sites. What problems do you encounter?
But all they’re doing is user-agent parsing.
Just lie about your user agent (using an extension) and chase will let you login, their site works fine with Firefox.
Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla
Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations
Allow Firefox to install and run studies
Allow Firefox to send backlogged crash reports on your behalf
But, let's give them a pass because they're not based on Chromium.
Of course, the actual bots will just enable topics and fill it with random data, and only the privacy conscious will be negatively affected.
It's absolutely a concern, just as sites relying on WEI is a concern. But it seems unlikely that sites will intentionally choose to exclude a non-trivial portion of their visitors.
If you want to make it even less likely, though, this is a great time to switch to Firefox (for its independence, as a browser not based on the Chrome engine at all).
I have never clicked on facebook/instagram links because of their login walls, I have ceased to click on twitter links since they've implemented theirs, I will do the same even with youtube when it inevitably follows the same path.
ultimately, I understand why we don't matter to them, so I don't really mind.
Until Web Environment Integrity lands too.
(afaik there's no FloC attestation, but I'm not 100% confident about that)
"We need to make money to operate this service and we can't support users who won't help us do that", or something to that effect.
I give it six months.
Best as I can tell: Jon von Tetzchner always had one primary goal - to become an industry titan, primarily like Bill Gates.
He founded Vivaldi after he was was thrown out by Opera's board in 2010.
I don't have any insight into why that happened, but I do know that at that time he was a terrible leader who simply wasn't able to prioritize and scope at all. Exactly anything that was "good" had the highest priority.
For the sake of his employees at Vivaldi, I really do hope that he has gone through some personal developments since then.
He did have a bunch of positive traits too! Can't tell in detail without exposing myself though.
What made Opera great was the people working there. The amount of knowledge and raw talent that lived in the tight hallways of Waldemar Thranes gate 98 was impressive. Looking at Vivaldi's "Our Team" page, it looks they have almost recreated the same team from back when I joined. I miss that period!
Could you please explain, in your opinion, why its bad that Jon von Tetzchner have a goal to become an industry titan?
chrome://settings/adPrivacy/interests
That is why on my personal computers I do not use Google Chrome and for many years I haven’t.
> chrome://settings/adPrivacy/interests
And eventually there'll be another setting in another location, and then it'll start accidentally forgetting your settings between versions, and then it'll start prompting you on start-up to make sure you really want a degraded browsing experience …. We know where this leads.
Who knows what a future update brings; either enabling it silently, changing the disabling flow, or even removing the option to disable altogether.
But by further spreading Blink, they are part of the issue.
Disabling Topics is nice for their users. In the short term at least. And they should, of course. They have nothing to gain from leaving this misfeature enabled.
But Vivaldi: we don't need you to help Google in their browser dominance. This browser dominance is exactly why Google can pull such a feature out from their ass in the first place.
But indeed, the funding from Google is a big issue for me. I hope they eventually manage to get rid of it. It's not sustainable, and also one can't be 100% free to say fuck the Google's business model while relying on Firefox. I also suspect this funding may be preventing Firefox from being as good as possible with respect to privacy, to avoid upsetting Google. I would not be surprised there is something related in the contract between Google and Mozilla.
More generally, all the 3 current mainstream browser engines depend on GAFAM funding and I don't like it.
I'm looking at emerging alternatives with great interest. I see new developments on Servo and Ladybird with a good eye.
What? Firefox can't be included in "Blink-based", it's based on Gecko.
> they may as well have dumped Gecko for Blink at this point
What?
firefox on the linux desktop.
These guys simply rock.
So far so good. The extension support is great.