What they haven't done before is spend a fortune buying up an ad-tech start up. They barely even bother to maintain a pretense that they care about Firefox users. They basically came right out and said "We know that users don't want this, we can't convince them to, so we were right to force it on them by default and just hope most people don't notice and start complaining" (https://cdn.adtidy.org/blog/new/2wffyscreen_mozilla.png?mw=1...)

Add this to /etc/hosts

    0.0.0.0 www.google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 google-analytics.com
    0.0.0.0 ssl.google-analytics.com

It gives no benefits to end users. Ad companies will not stop using old methods, they will just add one more method.

I hope responsible Linux distributions will patch this out and disable by default.

A fair model would be if this feature was opt-in and if Mozilla paid to the users who enabled it.

> The purpose of this API is to provide a privacy-first design for advertising companies to be able to measure how advertising drives conversions. That is, answering the question of whether advertising effectively achieves its goals, such as increased sales.

Not my problem. I don't earn anything from their sales.

Firefox is rock solid, open-source, backed by a great organization (which has recently reinvested additional resources in it) and a joy to use imo. Also, the levels of vitriol that even the slightest bit of anonymous telemetry incurs is unhelpful and I encourage people who hold that viewpoint to really interrogate it.

Right now is actually Safari that prevents it, like it or not. Especially iOS one where users have to use it. Firefox is rounding error in this fight.

The implementation is just FLoC/Topics API all over again and it's still not compelling. The first kick in the teeth comes right at the start where the entire thing is predicated on data gathered from having an ad shoved in your face.

> At impression time, information about an advertisement is saved by the browser in a write-only store. This includes an identifier for the ad and whether this was an ad view or an ad click.

I do not want ads. Ever. Like many (likely most) firefox users, I go to some lengths to prevent them from showing up in any form. Now that firefox is going to be profiting directly off of firefox users seeing and clicking on ads they will certainly degrade our ability to prevent them.

It then involves sending my data to third parties so that it can be aggregated. Then my browsing has to be monitored to identify conversion events. None of this is acceptable.

Here's what their Cookie Monster paper says:

> User perspective. Ann browses various publisher sites that provide content she is interested in, such as nytimes.com and facebook.com. Ann does not mind seeing relevant advertising, understanding that it funds the free content she enjoys.

I am not Ann. I very much mind seeing advertising, relevant or not. I do not understand that if funds "free content" I enjoy. If I need to be exploited to pay for something, that thing it isn't "free" and if it's infested with ads I do not enjoy it. The entire thing is based on a fantasy where users find this acceptable. We don't and it isn't. If we did, we'd probably all just be using chrome.

> FF is currently a key tool in the fight to avoid a Google-top-to-bottom future

Why should we care if Firefox isn't Google if both are just going to exploit us?

Assuming that's true, it seems to waste everyone's time and bits to fake it instead of just not answering or a minimal denial.

There is a risk that it ends up like cookie banners, and the adtech industry manages to brainwash the world into thinking that the government is the bad guy and they just want some harmless data to share with their 1,345 best friends and they are “forced” to show these. Despite there being no requirement at all to track data, and they break the law with it anyway so why bother.

- $120-140k, hetero, white, 190-220 lb, broadly Christian.

- $137,500/y, prefers tall redhead females, Irishman originally from Cork, 197 lb, observant Catholic.

The first one is too unspecific, while the second could suffice to identify a particular person in a neighborhood.

What makes a butter knife safe is not that it's completely devoid of an edge, but that its edge is sufficiently blunt.

FWIW the about section says this: "Each privacy test examines whether the browser, on default settings, protects against a specific kind of data leak."

The maintainer is a Brave employee and this is a project they were already doing before joining Brave. I'm hoping that they aren't manipulating it in favor of Brave.

I sent those three options as a feature request. Do you think the site is still useful in some capacity?

Submitting your website to a list controlled by some arbitrary website on the Internet is very much different from serving some kind of metadata to visitors that their browsers interpret.

Also the approval process existing does matter. Under a normal situation when you serve some kind of metadata (like what sites you are "related" to) there is no "approval" process to who gets to serve this kind of metadata and who doesn't.

The tools to do this the right way exist in so many different ways.

This is not how it works. The mechanism is about allowing a cluster of websites to choose a single first party domain and have all of them share cookies together, not sharing arbitrary cookie from arbitrary domain, otherwise it would create loopholes in connected components that bring back the downsides of third-party cookies. What you mentioned should be done using SSO.

After thinking about it a bit more, I have a clearer picture of how it should work in my mind:

* All cookies are double-keyed: the primary key is the origin of the top-level page and the secondary key is the origin of the page that sets the cookie, just like how partitioned cookies work right now.

* stackoverflow.com uses a header, meta tag or script to request changing its primary key domain to “stackexchange.com”

* The browser makes a request to https://stackexchange.com/domains.txt and make sure that “stackoverflow.com” is in the list, authorising this first-party domain change

* When the user agrees to the change, the page is reloaded with stackexchange.com as the primary key, thus stackoverflow.com can obtain login details from stackexchange.com via CORS or cross site cookies.

* A side effect is that all cookies and state are lost when switching the first-party domain. Should stackoverflow.com be acquired by a new owner, say x.com and changes its first-party domain to x.com, all cookies on stackoverflow.com are lost and the user will have to login on x.com again, maybe using credentials from stackexchange.com. It’s unfortunate but it works around the issues mentioned in the post in a clean way, avoiding loopholes that transfer cookies by switching the first-party domain frequently.

Replace "Chrome" with "Internet Explorer" and we're back to 1999.

Could you elaborate?

(I know next to nothing about Brave, so I may not be aware of obvious examples)

Though regardless of that, Related web sites (or whatever that set is currently called) does present a hole in that logic. It was originally meant to allow sites with different domains to share cookies/storage (like google.com and google.co.uk). From what it sounds like, bad actors are using it in the expected ways. There were supposed to be mechanisms to prevent this, but it seems like they failed in this case.

The list is in a public repository however, so Brave could have filled issues and a pull request to address the issue. Instead they decided to stage a meaningless survey and declare Chrome a threat to people everywhere.

Easily said, until it's your bank, or a government entity, or the electric company, or any of the thousands of other entities that have started blocking Firefox.

Firefox should really camouflage its user agent, or make it trivial to do so.

Most people were never worried, and probably will never be worried, with the points you're listing there. That's not to say they've stopped hating browser monopolies, just maybe not your definition of what a browser monopoly is or why they're problematic.

In general (not just browsers) most people treat "popularity" and "monopoly" as completely orthogonal concepts. I.e. something unpopular can still be a monopoly, something with 99% usage can still not be a monopoly. There is typically just a tendency for extremely popular things to also happen to be a monopoly.

I'd like Firefox to stick around, but as far as I'm concerned, if Safari goes away, I couldn't care less.

I've been using Brave as primary for years. At this point I'd pay for a license if it were necessary. Frankly that would be an improvement: if it's free, you're the product. Brave just monetizes you differently.

I no longer argue with the legion of Brave haters. I've decided they're a benefit: the more people that don't use Brave the less likely Google et al. will be compelled to destroy it.

* side tabs, I would say, the tab is a horizontal extension of the page, so they're horizontal tabs, right?

Mozilla is a husk of what it could have been, and that's hurt Firefox.

These are the primary issues I hear about regarding Brave on this forum.

It's also founded by Brendan Eich who was forced out of Mozilla for his strong and vocal opposition of same-sex marriage. I tend to be a bit idealistic, but this is a strong reason for me to avoid Brave, especially when they are injecting content into pages.

Way more than just two chromium browsers in existence.

ZIP codes contain maybe 40K residents [0] (many contain fewer) and there have been around 25K days in the last 70 years. Sure births are not evenly distributed, but still...

[0] https://www.unitedstateszipcodes.org/images/comparison-of-po...

To clarify: your date of birth includes the year. It’s more specific than your birthday, which we usually think of as just day & month.