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Soooo.. This is sending "Hey, this is a kid on a restricted machine" to all servers now? I mean I fail to understand the original idea, obviously. It makes no

Soooo.. This is sending "Hey, this is a kid on a restricted machine" to all servers now? I mean I fail to understand the original idea, obviously. It makes no sense to me. But I question the value of the above - basically now the server can _just as easily_ do crap with that information. You can now identify minors (using that feature). Beautiful. The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean for parents, they cannot decide what is ~okay~ or what isn't. Referencing a random US regulation/law (COPPA?) in a discussion about international traffic, international browser products seems crazy. If you want to prevent your kids from accessing 'stuff', make sure that 'stuff' is filtered on their machine or better on the edge of your network. Don't believe that random guys on the net will correctly guess what you find questionable content for kids and hide it, because .. your kid's browser sent a friendly "My parents didn't allow me to see unspecified things" header. Edit: I reread that thing over and over again. Something else that utterly blows my mind is this: Users won’t find any UI in Firefox to enable or disable Prefer:Safe, which becomes one less thing for kids to try to circumvent to disable this control. Newsflash: That includes the parents. Unless that is utterly misleading (or my English as a second language parser fails) this means that I, as a parent [1], can NOT - activate parental control features that are somehow detected by Fx - opt out of that idiotic header that announces decisions from my private household to each and every server, starting with Google for example 1: Hypothetical example. While I've got two kids, but both are too young to operate a computer yet and I probably won't buy into standard 'parental control' solutions anyway.

user24 12y ago
Agreed; "The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean for parents" is the most important part, for me. There are as many definitions of "what is appropriate for kids to see" as there are parents. The decision belongs with the parents, not with the 3rd party sites who, let's not forget, are the ones supplying the content in the first place. This just seems like an utterly naive and vague idea.
realusername 12y ago
I exactly had the same idea... I would also add that this thing is going to be useless anyway because not all the websites are going to implement it. So you will have this header + the traditional blocker... It's totally unrelated but something I would really like to have right now would be a header with the average connection bandwidth (or just thresholds). This could be really useful to reduce the amount of data sent if the connection is really bad.
- icebraining 12y ago
  I exactly had the same idea... I would also add that this thing is going to be useless anyway because not all the websites are going to implement it. So you will have this header + the traditional blocker... It's not useless, since it allows the site to avoid being blocked by hiding the "bad" content. Ideally blockers would be smart enough to recognize and block only the "bad" DOM elements, but they usually just block the whole page, if not the whole site.
  - darklajid 12y ago
    That is absolutely meaningless. What is bad content? The header doesn't tell what the client considers 'bad' or not 'safe', it's a bool. Given that, I see these possible outcomes - the client's admin might not care about this site at all (effort to hide stuff would be wasted?) - the client's admin might consider content 'unsafe' that seems fine/okay to the site operator => Blocklist, failed to archive what you suggest - the client's admin might consider content 'safe' that the site now refuses to share => Curse site and Mozilla, switch browsers and/or consider that site broken and the operators morons (similar to 'breaks zoom on mobile devices' today, for example)
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Sure, all those outcomes will happen, since servers and filters will have to implicitly agree on what is "safe". But the type of content blocked isn't random; there are a few prevalent concepts and terms which site operators are likely to follow. That said, I think the implementation should have an admin-controlled site whitelist and even a way to disable the header even if parental controls are enabled, to prevent (3).
    - ClassicFarris 12y ago
      Your comment about the bool, got me thinking. This would have been better implemented if it was thought of along the lines of movie rating system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_rating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_rating_system However, this got me thinking that across cultural lines there are a lot of shades to what is "safe". So a website based in Austria might want to restrict different content than a website based in Australia, and who knows where the "browser" is based. Of course your comments about the site actually implementing anything/correctly still apply.
fafner 12y ago
You can't identify minors because this isn't just a feature for minors but, e.g., for companies or public terminals as well. Of course it depends on the websites to deal with it. But, e.g., most popular porn sites actually do care about stuff like this. There is no UI in Firefox because Firefox uses the operating systems parental control features to enable/disable it. And those features should have a UI within the system. That's why it is only implemented for OS X and Windows at the moment.
- darklajid 12y ago
  Your last paragraph is what I can't understand. Ignoring OS X for now (wouldn't know a thing about that): Parental control in Windows just lets me set time limits/limits on what programs/games I can run as far as I know (just double checked microsoft.com and that's what they list as well). Given that and my understanding of the Fx feature means that Fx understands that this is a machine with parental controls enabled and _shares that with the world_. That is nonsense. It's crap. The world cannot (as I stated before) decide what is okay and what not. Going with your porn example (I .. kinda expected that): I'd be entirely fine with a 16yo kid to look at porn. I might not want that very same kid to use the computer around 2am in the night. For the latter I can use parental control features. You (and Mozilla) force your (weird, from this pov) moral/set of values on me. Enabling parental control does NOT mean that I want the world to know about it. It also doesn't imply that porn isn't okay. On the other hand, maybe I would put the NRA website on the list of things I don't want to see in my household. No one can decide what is okay or not - except for the parent/admin. "There is no UI in Firefox, because Firefox uses the OS parental control features to enable/disable it" is missing the point. Unless I fail to understand what this does I cannot use the parental controls without Firefox/Mozilla abusing that flag and asking the YouPorn administrators for parental support. This is a misfeature and at best useless, although I'd lean towards harmful and wrong.
  - fafner 12y ago
    You are just assuming things here. I don't know the parental control features of Windows. And I don't know when this will be enabled. But I don't see a reason why this should be always enabled as soon as parental features are used. In the end Mozilla is implementing a Microsoft proposal here. I would assume that the parental controls have a setting to enable it. So it kinda seems to me that you are building a strawman to attack. If you want to block specific websites or specific content then you obviously need to use a different tool as well.

user24 12y ago

Agreed; "The server operators cannot decide what 'parental control' would mean for parents" is the most important part, for me. There are as many definitions of "what is appropriate for kids to see" as there are parents. The decision belongs with the parents, not with the 3rd party sites who, let's not forget, are the ones supplying the content in the first place. This just seems like an utterly naive and vague idea.

realusername 12y ago

I exactly had the same idea... I would also add that this thing is going to be useless anyway because not all the websites are going to implement it. So you will have this header + the traditional blocker... It's totally unrelated but something I would really like to have right now would be a header with the average connection bandwidth (or just thresholds). This could be really useful to reduce the amount of data sent if the connection is really bad.

icebraining 12y ago
I exactly had the same idea... I would also add that this thing is going to be useless anyway because not all the websites are going to implement it. So you will have this header + the traditional blocker... It's not useless, since it allows the site to avoid being blocked by hiding the "bad" content. Ideally blockers would be smart enough to recognize and block only the "bad" DOM elements, but they usually just block the whole page, if not the whole site.
- darklajid 12y ago
  That is absolutely meaningless. What is bad content? The header doesn't tell what the client considers 'bad' or not 'safe', it's a bool. Given that, I see these possible outcomes - the client's admin might not care about this site at all (effort to hide stuff would be wasted?) - the client's admin might consider content 'unsafe' that seems fine/okay to the site operator => Blocklist, failed to archive what you suggest - the client's admin might consider content 'safe' that the site now refuses to share => Curse site and Mozilla, switch browsers and/or consider that site broken and the operators morons (similar to 'breaks zoom on mobile devices' today, for example)
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Sure, all those outcomes will happen, since servers and filters will have to implicitly agree on what is "safe". But the type of content blocked isn't random; there are a few prevalent concepts and terms which site operators are likely to follow. That said, I think the implementation should have an admin-controlled site whitelist and even a way to disable the header even if parental controls are enabled, to prevent (3).
  - ClassicFarris 12y ago
    Your comment about the bool, got me thinking. This would have been better implemented if it was thought of along the lines of movie rating system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_rating_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_picture_rating_system However, this got me thinking that across cultural lines there are a lot of shades to what is "safe". So a website based in Austria might want to restrict different content than a website based in Australia, and who knows where the "browser" is based. Of course your comments about the site actually implementing anything/correctly still apply.

fafner 12y ago

You can't identify minors because this isn't just a feature for minors but, e.g., for companies or public terminals as well. Of course it depends on the websites to deal with it. But, e.g., most popular porn sites actually do care about stuff like this. There is no UI in Firefox because Firefox uses the operating systems parental control features to enable/disable it. And those features should have a UI within the system. That's why it is only implemented for OS X and Windows at the moment.

darklajid 12y ago
Your last paragraph is what I can't understand. Ignoring OS X for now (wouldn't know a thing about that): Parental control in Windows just lets me set time limits/limits on what programs/games I can run as far as I know (just double checked microsoft.com and that's what they list as well). Given that and my understanding of the Fx feature means that Fx understands that this is a machine with parental controls enabled and _shares that with the world_. That is nonsense. It's crap. The world cannot (as I stated before) decide what is okay and what not. Going with your porn example (I .. kinda expected that): I'd be entirely fine with a 16yo kid to look at porn. I might not want that very same kid to use the computer around 2am in the night. For the latter I can use parental control features. You (and Mozilla) force your (weird, from this pov) moral/set of values on me. Enabling parental control does NOT mean that I want the world to know about it. It also doesn't imply that porn isn't okay. On the other hand, maybe I would put the NRA website on the list of things I don't want to see in my household. No one can decide what is okay or not - except for the parent/admin. "There is no UI in Firefox, because Firefox uses the OS parental control features to enable/disable it" is missing the point. Unless I fail to understand what this does I cannot use the parental controls without Firefox/Mozilla abusing that flag and asking the YouPorn administrators for parental support. This is a misfeature and at best useless, although I'd lean towards harmful and wrong.
- fafner 12y ago
  You are just assuming things here. I don't know the parental control features of Windows. And I don't know when this will be enabled. But I don't see a reason why this should be always enabled as soon as parental features are used. In the end Mozilla is implementing a Microsoft proposal here. I would assume that the parental controls have a setting to enable it. So it kinda seems to me that you are building a strawman to attack. If you want to block specific websites or specific content then you obviously need to use a different tool as well.