5 ms·

Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission l

Firefox is a great deal more privacy focused than Safari when you start factoring in containers. I also wouldn’t trust Apple to stick to their privacy mission long term. It’s a marketing strategy that they seemingly care about at the moment but it’s supplementary to their core demographics so who’s to say they stick with this vision long term? I’m less concerned about the same happening with Firefox. > In 10 - 15 years the web should be better than it is today. That doesn’t align with the trends we’ve seen: - tracking getting ever more sophisticated (like using WebRTC to probe open ports) - large scale data mining sites like Facebook ignoring government regulations and getting away with it - bloat getting worse. So many sites don’t even render without JS enabled. The fact that people have to run things like PiHole and browser plugins to filter out some of that crap is telling. And how long is that going to last? Some sites are now proxying that crap behind their own domain and DoH will prevent users from running PiHole - The web slowly converting on a single rendering engine: Blink. It’s starting to feel a bit like the IE 5 days with everyone targeting the same browser. Just last week I couldn’t log into a pretty low tech website because their UA filtering said I was on an unsupported browser and greyed out the login button (I was on Firefox).

hakfoo 6y ago
Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams. It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business." The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy. I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?
atombender 6y ago
The problem with Firefox containers is that it requires micromanaging your web browsing. I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt. I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  Does Alexa still maintain their list of categorizations of the top N million websites?
- pabs3 6y ago
  Why couldn't you compartmentalize all web sites? Seems like something that could be easily done.
  - atombender 6y ago
    There are a bunch of challenges with regard to what you allow a container to access. Here's one issue: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/473 https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/4....
    - laumars 6y ago
      That issue genuinely doesn’t come up often. I’ve ran into it once in a year of using FF containers and even then, that was because of a weird DIY SSO solution I’m running on my home LAN (certainly not something most folk are going to run into). Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare. There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience. The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
- 6y ago
higerordermap 6y ago
Privacy focused people is a fringe market at best.

hakfoo 6y ago

Apple can try to swing around the privacy bat right now because they have alternate revenue streams. It will be interesting how long their shareholders will buy the premise that "we can earn more by using privacy to convince people to buy our high-margin kit and run Safari than we would by casting off the privacy mantle and getting deep into the data-grab business." The other side of the coin is that I really believe there's a bubble waiting to burst in that exact industry. The price of building and feeding hyper-targeted, data-bloated marketing machines is far out of scale with their utility for most use cases, but people are throwing silly money at it right now. (Compare the Smart TV/IoT device model, where they believe that peddling usage data is enough to justify an increased BoM AND frequently selling the product near or under cost). If they expect the bubble to burst (either through marketers coming to their senses or heavy-duty GDPR style regulation), they might be just "passively" pushing the privacy angle-- don't bother building out an infrastructure that will be worthless as soon as the bubble bursts, and you come out of it with a huge branding/goodwill win when everyone else reinvents their business model and invents privacy. I was surprised Chromium!Edge ended up being such a mess with privacy because, somewhat like Apple, MS has associated businesses that let them subsidize its development without having to leverage user data. They could have come out looking good-- weren't they the only ones who tried to make a go of Do Not Track headers?

atombender 6y ago

The problem with Firefox containers is that it requires micromanaging your web browsing. I'm sure it's nice for people who obsess about privacy, but it's not something that the general user population is going to adopt. I think the right approach, ultimately, would be compartmentalize all web sites, but that's not feasible right now.

floatingatoll 6y ago
Does Alexa still maintain their list of categorizations of the top N million websites?
pabs3 6y ago
Why couldn't you compartmentalize all web sites? Seems like something that could be easily done.
- atombender 6y ago
  There are a bunch of challenges with regard to what you allow a container to access. Here's one issue: https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/473 https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/4....
  - laumars 6y ago
    That issue genuinely doesn’t come up often. I’ve ran into it once in a year of using FF containers and even then, that was because of a weird DIY SSO solution I’m running on my home LAN (certainly not something most folk are going to run into). Don’t get me wrong, the issue was highly annoying but it’s definitely not a frequent bug bare. There are existing extensions for managing some popular cloud platforms and that goes a long way in terms of convenience. The bigger annoyance is sites that intentionally cross talk (like “deploy stacks” buttons where 3rd party sites can run Cloudformation scripts against your AWS console). But in those cases it’s an annoyance I’m willing to manage considering they’re blocked by Temporary Containers doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
6y ago

higerordermap 6y ago

Privacy focused people is a fringe market at best.