8 ms·

Interesting approach. I hope more browser vendors will adopt it. It comes with an additional advantage: if a website still needs to function when tracking domai

Interesting approach. I hope more browser vendors will adopt it. It comes with an additional advantage: if a website still needs to function when tracking domains are delayed a second or so, they likely will function too with said domain completely disabled (e.g. using extensions). Sounds like a win from a user perspective.

michaelmior 9y ago
Do you mean that browsers implementing this will force website owners to make their sites work with tracking domains delayed? This does seem like a nice side benefit.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  With tracking domains disabled!? Website operators will be annoyed by the delays, so they have an incentive to make the display of their website independent from tracking, which then also should make the website work just fine if tracking is blocked completely.
- marten-de-vries 9y ago
  Yes, that's my hope. For the income of website owners it is better if they all collectively block their site until the trackers are fully loaded. But if only a few do so, users might avoid their site, so individuals are still encouraged to support delayed loading. I imagine Mozilla is in a similar situation: if too many websites block, they will have to disable the delay or start whitelisting trackers if they do not want to loose users. That is, unless other browsers follow their lead here. Prisoner's dilemmas all around. It's going to be fun to see what we'll end up with, although I'm optimistic as I haven't heard complaints about this yet, but then again I wouldn't notice any difference myself as I'm already using NoScript.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
    I think it's not quite a normal prisoner's dilemma, because it's not boolean. The browser can be less aggressive initially, pushing against only the worst cases, then become more aggressive over time to make site behave better.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  He meant that no browser with a significant market share will implement thi, the sites will remain broken which will only be evident in firefox. The side effect will be people visiting those sites will switch a different browser.
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    Given the OP's reply, I don't think that's what he meant so I would be careful about making statements on behalf of others. Apparently Firefox is sitting at 6.1% market share right now[0]. Far behind Chrome and Safari but still quite significant. [0] https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/mozilla-market-share/ https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/mozilla-market-s...
OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago
So the identified trackers' requests are.. merely delayed? Wowwie! It's a great justification for building a database of perceived trackers though. Lots of useful info to slurp. A better idea: DO NOT LOAD TRACKERS PERIOD. EDIT: Look how the crowd treats alternative opinions. Can't have that, can we?
- xeromal 9y ago
  You write like an old grandma
- mquander 9y ago
  There's an opt-in "tracking protection" checkbox in Firefox you can click that doesn't load them at all.
  - zaphirplane 9y ago
    Hmm doesn’t it send a do not track cookie, tracker JS is still loaded and discretionary
    - jonchang 9y ago
      No, it's basically a content blocker like Adblock or noscript.
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        I'm convinced it's not. noscript is blocking scripts and xss and does all kinds of things, while mozilla intently removed the option to disable scripts in firefox. I do not know about adblock as I stopped using it a long time ago and now use ublock origin a general purpose blocker, but I certainly remember how mozilla was vocal about never adding a blocker in firefox as this would be contrary to <insert BS PR> (actually their business model).
        Sylos 9y ago
flukus 9y ago
Trouble is the amount of popular websites that simply don't care how long the page takes to load, 30 seconds would be acceptable to many as long as they get their advertising dollars. Users won't know who to blame. They might blame the site but they're just as likely to blame Firefox, Microsoft, their ISP or a virus. There needs to be a display saying "hey, this site is slow because it's tracking you in 15 different ways, would you like to disable this permanently?".
- thephyber 9y ago
  You're not thinking about this from a game theory perspective. Slow down pages -> more users bounce -> fewer ad impressions -> less ad revenue.
  - coolspot 9y ago
    Also possible scenario is Slow down pages -> more users frustrated with Firefox -> fewer user share -> Mozilla closes and donates all code to Apache Foundation.
    - zaphirplane 9y ago
      Or eclipse which gets unloved projects
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      That would be great ! Where do I sign for this ? I cannot wait for this to happen.
  - nyolfen 9y ago
    how is this game theory?
  - mehrdadn 9y ago
    > You're not thinking about this from a game theory perspective. > Slow down pages -> more users bounce -> fewer ad impressions -> less ad revenue. Game theory is the theory of how agents deal with each other. You left out the most crucial part of agents affecting each other!
legohead 9y ago
This shouldn't be up to the browser. He even notes edge cases where this performs unexpectedly -- unacceptable. If this is such an issue and can actually be a performance increase, then someone should release a script with the same functionality. Or optionally make it an opt-in option in settings.
- marten-de-vries 9y ago
  They do not violate the relevant specification. They just implement it in a way that has not been done before with the user's convenience in mind. That aside, your position is unrealistic: browsers regularly break non-spec conforming websites. They actually monitor such cases (telemetry) and try to work with popular websites to fix the issue before they ship the breaking update, but it's a tradeoff that is regularly made nonetheless.
  - xg15 9y ago
    While the actions were beneficial in this case, that argument would be more convincing if the spec itself weren't a constantly moving "Living standard" maintained by the exact same organisations that also develop the browsers. And even that spec is sometimes consciously broken in an "intervention".
- testvox 9y ago
  It shouldn't be up to the browser to implement web standards? What should browsers be doing then?
  - legohead 9y ago
    What is the web standard about delaying scripts deliberately encoded into the page? Why downvote and no explanation? I want to know if I missed something.
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      Per the standards, scheduling and prioritization of downloads is up to browsers. The standard also defines that scripts that are not async have to be executed before later content can be parsed (because they can document.write()). They can still be loaded with any priority the browser wants; they just need to block observable DOM construction.
sometimes42 9y ago
It seems short-sighted to me. It's penalizing vendors who went through the trouble to make their scripts load asynchronously - which is done specifically to help page load performance. The worst offenders, who block the page with sync scripts, actually gain a competitive advantage from this change.
notyourday 9y ago
I have an even better approach: uBlock origin + noscript
- fishmeat 9y ago
  Is there much different between uBlock origin vs Ad Block Plus?
  - marcoperaza 9y ago
    Yes, Adblock Plus lets website operators pay them money to be whitelisted, if the ads comply with the "Acceptable Ads" policy.
  - XzetaU8 9y ago
    "Unexpected results: Adblock plus does not help with system resource utilisation" https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384 https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    adblock plus is commercial operated and is paid by advertisers to get whitelisted, akin to an extorsion mafia business. It's an ad blocker coming with tainted default settings. It used to significantly impact performances (not sure if this is still the case). ublock origin is a one man personal project to improve his online browsing experience that he shared with the public and has become the goto reference. It has no whitelist or acceptable ads policy, is a general purpose blocker (blocks trackers, remote fonts, etc.) coming with sane default settings. It does not have the same performance issues adblock plus has. In short: ditch adblock plus and switch to ublock origins. You'll find more details here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- acobster 9y ago
  uMatrix is also great. It does a lot of the same things NoScript does, but at a greater granularity. I still use NoScript for its XSS protection features but have the main JS-blocking feature disabled because it's redundant.
Feniks 9y ago
I block ads, analytics and 3rd party fonts. Almost every site works just fine.
- cabaalis 9y ago
  As I'm sure you're aware, many content creators that you are reading the work of fund their efforts via ads. I think this is a happy medium to attempt to improve performance of these pages without denying them compensation.
  - jstarfish 9y ago
    I used to feel bad about it, but it has become evident that any content creator still primarily funding themselves through third-party ads in 2017 is the digital equivalent of a streetwalker. It's a low-class business model that is rife with disease. There's no barrier to entry-- literally anybody can do it, there is no filtering of who they'll do business with, and it's a race to the bottom to earn pennies at the expense of their integrity. Despite having actual content of value, they share a business model with a blog farm full of Markov-generated malware-laden shitposts. Given the now-well-known threats to health and safety that third-party ads present, one does not have the right to get upset when clients insist on using protection when dealing with them. Set up a Patreon for donations, set up affiliate links or offer subscriber perks if adblocking is cutting into revenue. Either option is far more lucrative, ethical and honest than whoring oneself out for the benefit of some shady ad firm that leaves the user with a nasty case of Bonzi.
  - Sammi 9y ago
    If the ads didn't feel abusive then I might feel bad. But they do.
  - xaldir 9y ago
    Fine. Except figuring out a business model is the content creator responsibility not the user's. Business models that involve hostile 3rd party adds/tracking are bad and if your users are trying to evade those, you need to figure out something better. Blaming the user reaction won't help.

michaelmior 9y ago

Do you mean that browsers implementing this will force website owners to make their sites work with tracking domains delayed? This does seem like a nice side benefit.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
With tracking domains disabled!? Website operators will be annoyed by the delays, so they have an incentive to make the display of their website independent from tracking, which then also should make the website work just fine if tracking is blocked completely.
marten-de-vries 9y ago
Yes, that's my hope. For the income of website owners it is better if they all collectively block their site until the trackers are fully loaded. But if only a few do so, users might avoid their site, so individuals are still encouraged to support delayed loading. I imagine Mozilla is in a similar situation: if too many websites block, they will have to disable the delay or start whitelisting trackers if they do not want to loose users. That is, unless other browsers follow their lead here. Prisoner's dilemmas all around. It's going to be fun to see what we'll end up with, although I'm optimistic as I haven't heard complaints about this yet, but then again I wouldn't notice any difference myself as I'm already using NoScript.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  I think it's not quite a normal prisoner's dilemma, because it's not boolean. The browser can be less aggressive initially, pushing against only the worst cases, then become more aggressive over time to make site behave better.
bigbugbag 9y ago
He meant that no browser with a significant market share will implement thi, the sites will remain broken which will only be evident in firefox. The side effect will be people visiting those sites will switch a different browser.
- michaelmior 9y ago
  Given the OP's reply, I don't think that's what he meant so I would be careful about making statements on behalf of others. Apparently Firefox is sitting at 6.1% market share right now[0]. Far behind Chrome and Safari but still quite significant. [0] https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/mozilla-market-share/ https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2017/11/21/mozilla-market-s...

OnlyRepliesToBS 9y ago

So the identified trackers' requests are.. merely delayed? Wowwie! It's a great justification for building a database of perceived trackers though. Lots of useful info to slurp. A better idea: DO NOT LOAD TRACKERS PERIOD. EDIT: Look how the crowd treats alternative opinions. Can't have that, can we?

xeromal 9y ago
You write like an old grandma
mquander 9y ago
There's an opt-in "tracking protection" checkbox in Firefox you can click that doesn't load them at all.
- zaphirplane 9y ago
  Hmm doesn’t it send a do not track cookie, tracker JS is still loaded and discretionary
  - jonchang 9y ago
    No, it's basically a content blocker like Adblock or noscript.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      I'm convinced it's not. noscript is blocking scripts and xss and does all kinds of things, while mozilla intently removed the option to disable scripts in firefox. I do not know about adblock as I stopped using it a long time ago and now use ublock origin a general purpose blocker, but I certainly remember how mozilla was vocal about never adding a blocker in firefox as this would be contrary to <insert BS PR> (actually their business model).
      - Sylos 9y ago

flukus 9y ago

Trouble is the amount of popular websites that simply don't care how long the page takes to load, 30 seconds would be acceptable to many as long as they get their advertising dollars. Users won't know who to blame. They might blame the site but they're just as likely to blame Firefox, Microsoft, their ISP or a virus. There needs to be a display saying "hey, this site is slow because it's tracking you in 15 different ways, would you like to disable this permanently?".

thephyber 9y ago
You're not thinking about this from a game theory perspective. Slow down pages -> more users bounce -> fewer ad impressions -> less ad revenue.
- coolspot 9y ago
  Also possible scenario is Slow down pages -> more users frustrated with Firefox -> fewer user share -> Mozilla closes and donates all code to Apache Foundation.
  - zaphirplane 9y ago
    Or eclipse which gets unloved projects
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    That would be great ! Where do I sign for this ? I cannot wait for this to happen.
- nyolfen 9y ago
  how is this game theory?
- mehrdadn 9y ago
  > You're not thinking about this from a game theory perspective. > Slow down pages -> more users bounce -> fewer ad impressions -> less ad revenue. Game theory is the theory of how agents deal with each other. You left out the most crucial part of agents affecting each other!

legohead 9y ago

This shouldn't be up to the browser. He even notes edge cases where this performs unexpectedly -- unacceptable. If this is such an issue and can actually be a performance increase, then someone should release a script with the same functionality. Or optionally make it an opt-in option in settings.

marten-de-vries 9y ago
They do not violate the relevant specification. They just implement it in a way that has not been done before with the user's convenience in mind. That aside, your position is unrealistic: browsers regularly break non-spec conforming websites. They actually monitor such cases (telemetry) and try to work with popular websites to fix the issue before they ship the breaking update, but it's a tradeoff that is regularly made nonetheless.
- xg15 9y ago
  While the actions were beneficial in this case, that argument would be more convincing if the spec itself weren't a constantly moving "Living standard" maintained by the exact same organisations that also develop the browsers. And even that spec is sometimes consciously broken in an "intervention".
testvox 9y ago
It shouldn't be up to the browser to implement web standards? What should browsers be doing then?
- legohead 9y ago
  What is the web standard about delaying scripts deliberately encoded into the page? Why downvote and no explanation? I want to know if I missed something.
  - bzbarsky 9y ago
    Per the standards, scheduling and prioritization of downloads is up to browsers. The standard also defines that scripts that are not async have to be executed before later content can be parsed (because they can document.write()). They can still be loaded with any priority the browser wants; they just need to block observable DOM construction.

sometimes42 9y ago

It seems short-sighted to me. It's penalizing vendors who went through the trouble to make their scripts load asynchronously - which is done specifically to help page load performance. The worst offenders, who block the page with sync scripts, actually gain a competitive advantage from this change.

notyourday 9y ago

I have an even better approach: uBlock origin + noscript

fishmeat 9y ago
Is there much different between uBlock origin vs Ad Block Plus?
- marcoperaza 9y ago
  Yes, Adblock Plus lets website operators pay them money to be whitelisted, if the ads comply with the "Acceptable Ads" policy.
- XzetaU8 9y ago
  "Unexpected results: Adblock plus does not help with system resource utilisation" https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384 https://twitter.com/adildean/status/936183316134416384
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  adblock plus is commercial operated and is paid by advertisers to get whitelisted, akin to an extorsion mafia business. It's an ad blocker coming with tainted default settings. It used to significantly impact performances (not sure if this is still the case). ublock origin is a one man personal project to improve his online browsing experience that he shared with the public and has become the goto reference. It has no whitelist or acceptable ads policy, is a general purpose blocker (blocks trackers, remote fonts, etc.) coming with sane default settings. It does not have the same performance issues adblock plus has. In short: ditch adblock plus and switch to ublock origins. You'll find more details here: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
acobster 9y ago
uMatrix is also great. It does a lot of the same things NoScript does, but at a greater granularity. I still use NoScript for its XSS protection features but have the main JS-blocking feature disabled because it's redundant.

Feniks 9y ago

I block ads, analytics and 3rd party fonts. Almost every site works just fine.

cabaalis 9y ago
As I'm sure you're aware, many content creators that you are reading the work of fund their efforts via ads. I think this is a happy medium to attempt to improve performance of these pages without denying them compensation.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  I used to feel bad about it, but it has become evident that any content creator still primarily funding themselves through third-party ads in 2017 is the digital equivalent of a streetwalker. It's a low-class business model that is rife with disease. There's no barrier to entry-- literally anybody can do it, there is no filtering of who they'll do business with, and it's a race to the bottom to earn pennies at the expense of their integrity. Despite having actual content of value, they share a business model with a blog farm full of Markov-generated malware-laden shitposts. Given the now-well-known threats to health and safety that third-party ads present, one does not have the right to get upset when clients insist on using protection when dealing with them. Set up a Patreon for donations, set up affiliate links or offer subscriber perks if adblocking is cutting into revenue. Either option is far more lucrative, ethical and honest than whoring oneself out for the benefit of some shady ad firm that leaves the user with a nasty case of Bonzi.
- Sammi 9y ago
  If the ads didn't feel abusive then I might feel bad. But they do.
- xaldir 9y ago
  Fine. Except figuring out a business model is the content creator responsibility not the user's. Business models that involve hostile 3rd party adds/tracking are bad and if your users are trying to evade those, you need to figure out something better. Blaming the user reaction won't help.