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Please, ublock has a big fat off button. Also, it is trivial to have am instance of chrome or safari available if your locked down firefox is blocking your cour

Please, ublock has a big fat off button. Also, it is trivial to have am instance of chrome or safari available if your locked down firefox is blocking your course work

floatingatoll 8y ago
Honestly, I would considers users who run Chrome or Safari without extensions to be safer than users who run Firefox with this guide's "few simple steps" applied. I'd rest more easily at night knowing they're protected by someone who's making judgement calls appropriate for non-technical users who have no support if something goes wrong.
- danShumway 8y ago
  But again, most users that can't operate an adblocker also cannot be trusted to browse the Internet without one. You're describing this setup like it's a choice between complicating someone's life or giving them a simple browser that just works. Phishing attacks are nasty. No matter what choice you make, a new user is going to have a complicated element they need to be educated about. You either have to teach them to use an adblocker, or you need to teach them Internet security best practices. To jump back to the same comparison I made earlier, this is like wiring a house without circuit breakers because the owner is too scared to mess with the little switches. Is it simpler? Sure, but it stops being simpler when their house burns down. Nontechnical users click on things; they particularly click on flashing banners that tell them they've won prizes, and they particularly click on images with scary fonts that tell them that their Facebook has the virus and needs to be updated. If you're going to give a nontechnical user a browser without an adblocker, you need some kind of other defense against phishing attacks, fake download links, cryptocurrency miners, and compromised Ads/CDNs that scrape credentials out of payment forms. Do you have an alternative defense? If not, then I really feel like for someone as tech-illiterate as you're describing, giving them a bare browser is roughly the equivalent of throwing them naked into a hostile environment.

Please, ublock has a big fat off button. Also, it is trivial to have am instance of chrome or safari available if your locked down firefox is blocking your course work

floatingatoll 8y ago

Honestly, I would considers users who run Chrome or Safari without extensions to be safer than users who run Firefox with this guide's "few simple steps" applied. I'd rest more easily at night knowing they're protected by someone who's making judgement calls appropriate for non-technical users who have no support if something goes wrong.

danShumway 8y ago
But again, most users that can't operate an adblocker also cannot be trusted to browse the Internet without one. You're describing this setup like it's a choice between complicating someone's life or giving them a simple browser that just works. Phishing attacks are nasty. No matter what choice you make, a new user is going to have a complicated element they need to be educated about. You either have to teach them to use an adblocker, or you need to teach them Internet security best practices. To jump back to the same comparison I made earlier, this is like wiring a house without circuit breakers because the owner is too scared to mess with the little switches. Is it simpler? Sure, but it stops being simpler when their house burns down. Nontechnical users click on things; they particularly click on flashing banners that tell them they've won prizes, and they particularly click on images with scary fonts that tell them that their Facebook has the virus and needs to be updated. If you're going to give a nontechnical user a browser without an adblocker, you need some kind of other defense against phishing attacks, fake download links, cryptocurrency miners, and compromised Ads/CDNs that scrape credentials out of payment forms. Do you have an alternative defense? If not, then I really feel like for someone as tech-illiterate as you're describing, giving them a bare browser is roughly the equivalent of throwing them naked into a hostile environment.