Original toot:

It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox's #PPA experiment don't actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it, so an explainer 🧵 is in order.

Targeted advertising sucks. It is invasive and privacy-violating, it enables populations to be manipulated by bad actors in democracy-endangering ways, and it doesn't actually sell products.

Nevertheless, commercial advertisers are addicted to the data they get from targeted advertising. They aren't going to stop using it until someone convinces them there's something else that will work better.

"Contextual advertising works better." Yes, it does! But, again, advertisers are addicted to the data, and contextual advertising provides much less data, so they don't trust it.

What PPA says is, "Suppose we give you anonymized, aggregated data about which of your ads on which sites resulted in sales or other significant commitments from users?" The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox's case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let's Encrypt; does anybody think they're not trustworthy?) and aggregated and anonymized there. Noise is introduced into the data to prevent de-anonymization.

This allows advertisers to "target" which sites they put their ads on. It doesn't allow them to target individuals. In Days Of Yore, advertisers would do things like ask people to bring newspapers ads into the store or mention a certain phrase to get deals. These were for collecting conversion statistics on paper ads. Ditto for coupons. PPA is a way to do this online.

Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party. If at some point they discover they're doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place. And if the work they're doing is transparent, as compared to the entirely opaque adtech industry, the entire internet can weigh in on any bugs in their algorithms.

Is this a utopia? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably. Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see. We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.

Original post (not mine): https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e1rskb/mozila_needs_to_learn_that_chromes_uiux_is_not/

@firefox

Hi. I'm one of the millions of AFGNCAAP users of your browser, and have been since like 2005.

I've stuck with you through memory leaks, and through struggles loading basic sites, and through security issues at my bank because they were idiots and you were safer to use than they wanted you to be.

So... please. Don't start pulling a Chrome about giving my data to advertisers.

Adding tracking in is bad enough. Not opting out by default is worse. Not ASKING ME TO?! That's being petty.

Does anyone know why Firefox doesn't show favicons when resolving local sites via name.local but does when loading the same sites via their IP address? Having checked Vivaldi, the sites favicons appear just fine using that.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/18633655

I can't exactly make out what it says after the error code thanks to the mystery unicode characters but I will try my best.

"The package couldn't pass the updating, or verification."

Recently I installed Firefox on my parents' phones (uBlock Origin too) in order to make them surf the web more securely as we've had a few cases in the past with malware. (Google Chrome, the advertisement company's browser, does not like ad blockers. Wonder why?)

All they care about it is it openning Google.com and apparently they don't like Firefox's home screen. There are only options for "the last tab", "home screen" and "home screen after few hours of inactivity" but no option to go to a specific web address. In this case, google.com.

So... how do?

I want URLs of a page to stay the same no matter where I scroll, including on Discourse where stopping at a certain comment changes the url to that comment's number. Scroll this page to see: https://meta.discourse.org/t/should-url-change-as-you-scroll/55302

Thunderbird's addon store is very lacking to compare to Firefox. Are there even technical limitations to this if Thunderbird use Firefox / Gecko under the hood?

Wow, that's awesome! I was very sad without the clickbait articles. I was staring at Firefox thinking "i wish it had a cluttered start page with clickbait articles and sponsored content like MS Edge" - and then with this new update the devs nailed it! Thanks!

That's really perfect!

Crossposted another Reddit user's post: https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1dso5sz/easy_trick_to_make_firefox_compact_1_in_firefoxs/

I just pulled down the latest Firefox Dev Edition AppImage and still getting the same result. I try to login to GitLab and I get an endless loop of checking whether I'm human or not. I tried to turn off tracking protection for GitLab and Cloudflare and added both to accept all cookies. In the network tab it eventually shows 403s. Anyone else have this happen or know if I can disable any more safety/privacy features to get it working?

Fingerprinting works by collecting bits of information about the browser and device to identify users. Couldn't browsers like Firefox see when a website gets such info with JS and either prevent or ask permission from the user for the website to make HTTP requests to upload such information to the website. Idk if they do something like this already.

I did the tests on fingerprint.com/demo/ and https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ and they both said I have a unique fingerprint, even when I enabled privacy.resistFingerprinting to True.

This is part of the Android release for Firefox 127.0.2.

Release notes

Please leave a comment on Bug : Android idle battery drain due to Firefox if you still experience this issue after updating Firefox and restarting your phone:

I read the descriptions for the Dcentraleyes and LocalCDN addons which cache popular JS frameworks and page assets to enhance privacy and speed up pages that use them (since the assets were downloaded beforehand). Does Firefox have any built-in functionality to cache frequently used assets, or are there any addons that do so?

For instance, If I access Reddit.com a lot, I would want all the resources that all those Reddit pages have in common to be cached automatically to make loading pages from the domain faster.

https://reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dofyj1/how_did_mozilla_firefox_go_from_being_the_best/

Post Text

Seriously, every post I read that's upvoted is smack talking Mozilla in every way possible and it just so happens to take place exactly when Google quietly announces Manifest V3. Mozilla is not our enemy, Google is. Don't let all these bot upvoted comments and posts let you forget that. Has Mozilla made some questionable moves lately? Yeah.. the biggest being the purchase of Anonym. https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/

We'll just have to wait and see how that turns out. But I found it amusing when I saw this post and it got so many upvotes immediately after Mozilla announced the purchase. https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1dkujuh/mozilla_anonym_is_a_datahoovering_monster/

Then Mozilla allegedly fired someone because he has cancer. https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/mozilla-is-trying-to-push-me-out-because-i-have-cancer-cpo-says-in-bombshell-lawsuit/ar-BB1oOjOZ

Then I was reading Mozilla android browser is suddenly the worst and least secure android browser.

It's never ending.. Honestly I think I am just going to take some time away from Reddit because it's becoming such a corporate shill and bot upvoted cesspool. I'm sure this will get heavily down-voted but I just wanted to give my two cents. Mozilla will always be my preferred choice for privacy and security and unless I see some actual changes within the browsers no one will ever convince me otherwise.

Tldr: Theyre adding an opt-in alt text generation for blind people and an opt-in ai chat sidebar where you can choose the model used (includes self-hosted ones)

• Fixed an issue where YouTube playback may experience stalling under certain conditions.

• Fixed an issue where the Private Window icon was displayed in the taskbar on Windows when browser.privateWindowSeparation.enabled was set to false.

In 2023, a significant portion of Firefox downloads came from unknown sources. We believe many of them came from 3rd party websites that let you download Firefox. While some websites are okay, others can put you at risk of downloading an old version or a build with the wrong locale, leading to security risks, a bad user experience, or even malicious installations.

Help the Firefox team to uncover this mystery by taking part in the Firefox 3rd-party installer campaign!

There will be swag, and you'll be featured in our blog if you manage to report 10 valid reports. So don’t forget to invite your friends too!

Have any questions about this campaign? Join us on Matrix or watch the recording of the SUMO community call with Romain Testard, Principal Product Manager at Mozilla.

Please also help spread the word about this campaign by sharing this on your social media.

Keep on rocking the helpful web, The Mozilla Support team

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...

In the latest Mozilla Firefox 127 release simply do the following:

• Go to about:config in a new tab
• ‘Accept Risk and Continue’
• Search for browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.system.showWeather
• Double-click the result to enable the feature