Clearly, Google is serious about trying to oust ad blockers from its browser, or at least those extensions with fuller (V2) levels of functionality. One of the crucial twists with V3 is that it prevents the use of remotely hosted code – as a security measure – but this also means ad blockers can’t update their filter lists without going through Google’s review process. What does that mean? Way slower updates for said filters, which hampers the ability of the ad-blocking extension to keep up with the necessary changes to stay effective.
(This isn’t just about browsers, either, as the war on advert dodgers extends to YouTube, too, as we’ve seen in recent months).
At any rate, Google is playing with fire here somewhat – or Firefox, perhaps we should say – as this may be the shove some folks need to get them considering another of the best web browsers out there aside from Chrome. Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has vowed to maintain support for V2 extensions, while introducing support for V3 alongside to give folks a choice (now there’s a radical idea).
Waiting for Mozilla to shoot their own foot again
Make sure to shit on them every fucking time anyone says the name “Mozilla”, that’ll help us not have anything except Chrome in a couple years.
It’s fine, there are open source projects underway. If any one of them gains traction, it could happen to Mozilla what happened to Unity with Godot. Here’s to hoping they get their act straight sooner tan later.
Oh, bullshit. There is nothing that has 1/100th of the effort that goes into gecko, because maintaining a web browser is ridiculously difficult. You’re living in a dreamworld if you think any other project is within a lightyear of Firefox.
idk why people think that these foss projects will be fully finished super quickly every time mozilla or google does some stupid shit. firefox exists solely because of googles funding due to web browsers being expensive/difficult to maintain. the effort being made for ladybird is amazing, but holy shit we are NOT gonna be at the ‘firefox and chrome alternative’ level unless they gain massive funding.
maybe i should get back into gemini
👍
Didn’t they just announce recently that they were going to work more with advertisers? https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/improving-online-advertising/
How to improve online advertising: Step 1: remove all online advertising
People completely misunderstand this feature (which is only a temporary prototype anyways), and I think that’s entirely Mozilla’s fault. They do a really poor job explaining it.
Usually ad networks implement sophisticated tracking, which works in a highly invasive way. They need the telemetry to watch their campaigns. Firefox now offers the option to collect a minimal amount of data for them and inform the network indirectly.
This is a good thing for the end user. The trackers are not needed, you gain privacy. Disabling the option makes it so you’re instantly tracked MORE.
Mozilla shouldn’t have staged this as an opt-out of the new system. You actually OPT-IN to networks running their old scripts on your machine to collect your telemetry:
[ ] Allow ad networks to run their own telemetry
(Beta functionality, some advertisers may still run their own trackers, even when this option is disabled.)
That would be the same thing, but communicate what it’s doing.
The fact that advertisers like Meta might be on board with this should be exciting to people. That they are even considering giving up so much data and now only receive a single number of impressions per campaign is very unexpected.
Also, none of this matters if you block ads anyways. If you don’t load the ad, neither the networks script runs its telemetry, nor does Firefox increase the counter for the campaign id.
If you’re wondering what’s every involved party’s gain in this, an interesting read is the IPA white paper, where the overall design targets for the system are stated: Interoperable Private Attribution (IPA), 2022
In particular:
In designing IPA, we set out to find a win-win-win solution for cross platform attribution measurement that met our goals across privacy, utility, and competition.
• Privacy: data collected about the user is minimized, protecting the end-users privacy. • Utility: the telemetry process is unified and simplified across all platforms, reducing the costs • Competition: it will be an open, standardized system, accessible to everyone
Just to be clear, I dislike the way Mozilla rolled this out. They already have a “Studies” checkmark that people can enable if they wish to participate in stuff like this. That Mozilla treats this prototype differently is actually not ok, and breaks trust with their users. But as far as I’m concerned, this is a completely separate topic from the update content, which I wish to be successful.
What about waiting for Google to shoot their own foot again, even though that already has happened numerous times?
again?
Before chrome became massively popular, Firefox was very popular. ie was still the most used browser back then