And then later I learned it was a cooperative effort, just not under the same name
Source?
They developed the "privacy sandbox" together.
Yeah that's not true.
You have to remember that sometimes when that shiny new CSS feature comes out, it is underspecced, with unhandled corner cases -- "just do what Chromium does" is not a standard -- or is it? Having multiple implementations of a spec prove that it is interoperable - without that, you might have a good spec, or you might have a spec that says "whatever Chrome does is what is expected". Not sure that is what we want from new CSS (or any) features.
I covered that - the CEO said that they "don’t write checks of unknown amount and sign them” in regards to MV2 extensions.
The Vivaldi blocker is obviously worse than uBlock Origin, I covered this in the article.
The 2FA thing sounds like it's all on the Dropbox side if you are just entering a code you got from an authenticator app. The Google login issue may be a real issue -- did the Google login specifically work on another browser?
There is nothing about MV3 that stops you from improving things.
What about this stuff?
Uhh, that doesn't seem normal at all. Is this a default config? Any extensions in use?
Probably simpler to just "Forget" the site from the site's context menu in the history sidebar.
"Vivaldi is closed source, therefore it's harder for users to investigate", which is clearly an inaccurate statement.
Why is it an inaccurate statement?
What user are you thinking of?
You really felt misled that it was harder to inspect? What makes you think I have the expertise to inspect this? I'm not even a user and I wouldn't know where to start to find the ad blocker within that tarball. Would you?
In any case, I clarified why it was harder to inspect - to me it felt obvious that being closed source made it harder to investigate. The fact that it is also shared source really has no bearing to the general observation, especially since we're talking about a 2GB tarball where I don't even know where to start. And I'm a pretty technical person.
How would a user easily investigate this vs. an open source browser?
It is, it is just source available. Still closed source.
I don't feel like talking to posts proxied from reddit.
Given that Eich was the leader of Mozilla for a short while but he found it hard to stay kinda makes me think Mozilla's leaders are currently better (or at least more acceptable). Can you point to leadership at Mozilla as "bad"?
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
Opera GX has promised to keep MV2 in their code. So I'll just keep using that until I see something different. The other thing is that Opera GX has built in ad-blocker which is pretty much on par with third parties.
I couldn't find a source for either of these claims. Can you help me out?
Not trying to be obtuse here, but why are you pruning your history in the first place? Is someone auditing your browsing history? I'm personally not interested in removing my browser history for the most part - and certainly not frequently enough to notice this limitation.
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
Google is weakening ad blockers as part of their MV3 extension standard and this will trickle down into all Chromium browsers. Built in ad blockers lack features compared to uBlock Origin as well.
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
We’ve been anticipating it for years, and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
Now that it is finally happening, many seem to be oddly resigned to the idea that Google is taking away the best and most powerful ad content blocker available on any web browser today, with one article recommending people set up a DNS based content blocker on their network 😒 – instead of more obvious solutions.
I may not have blogged about this but I recently read an article from 1999 about why Gopher lost out to the Web, where Christopher Lee discusses the importance of the then-novel term “mind share” and how it played an important part in dictating why the web won out. In my last post, I touched on the importance of good information to democracies – the same applies to markets (including the browser market) – and it seems to me that we aren’t getting good information about this topic.
This post is me trying to give you that information, to help increase the mind share of an actual alternative. Enjoy!
We’ve been anticipating it for years,1 and it’s finally happening. Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the ...
Google is finally killing uBlock Origin – with a note on their web store stating that the extension will soon no longer be available because it “doesn’t follow the best practices for Chrome extensions”.
The last few weeks have been interesting if you follow Firefox news. Mark Surman (President, Mozilla Foundation) and Laura Chambers (CEO, Mozilla Corporation...
These browser vendors have produced browser-based PPA (Privacy-Preserving [Ad] Attribution) technologies that attempt to establish a world where “advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance”.1 Unfortunately, after studying each proposal, I predict they will inadvertently lend themselves to further incentivize the publication and spread of low-quality information (including misinformation), polluting the information landscape and threatening democracies worldwide.
(I would generally be inclined to post something like this post to social media, but I recently read Molly White’s) post on POSSE, so… here we are.)
Firefox 131 is out, and with it arrives a change to the Tab overview menu: “a new, refreshed icon”.
There has been some outcry on social media, since the redesign came with an undesirable change for some - the button is no longer able to be hidden by default.
An update on Mozilla's PPA experiment and how it protects user privacy while testing cutting edge technologies to improve the open web.
An update on Mozilla's PPA experiment and how it protects user privacy while testing cutting edge technologies to improve the open web.
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed a...
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make Firefox secure, fast or to try new things. On the other side, this growing cost progressively killed the community of add-on developers. Eventually, after spending years trying to protect this old add-on mechanism, Mozilla made the hard choice of removing this extension mechanism and replacing this with the less powerful but much more maintainable WebExtensions API. Thanks to this choice, Firefox developers can once again make the necessary changes to improve security, stability or speed. During the past few days, I’ve been chatting with Firefox users, trying to separate fact from rumor regarding the consequences of the August 2020 Mozilla layoffs. One of the topics that came back a few times was the removal of XUL-based add-ons during the move to Firefox Quantum. I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice. And then, as someone pointed out on reddit, I realized that we still haven’t taken the time to explain in-depth why we had no choice but to remove XUL-based add-ons. So, if you’re ready for a dive into some of the internals of add-ons and Gecko, I’d like to take this opportunity to try and give you a bit more detail.
Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...
Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...
Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...
Mozilla did their biggest Reddit AMA yet on Thursday, June 13, with eight members of the Firefox leadership team. With 400 total comments on the post, they c...
Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.
Firefox 130 will feature an on-device AI model that automatically generates alt-text for images, integrated into its built-in PDF editor.
