It's a short blog post, but essentially talks about a world beyond surveillance advertising.

Wonder if all those people very publicly dumping Firefox, will also dump their Apple products in such a high profile fashion?

Just wanted to surface this comment, because not enough people are cognizant of the fact that adblockers do their job and prevent any PPA submissions.

I'm trying to use the Web Archives addons on Firefox Mobile and I have it installed and can configure it but I'm not sure how to actually use it. I can't right click like on desktop. Maybe I'm missing something obvious. Thanks.

Edit: so I guess I can go into the main menu, open my extension list, select Web Archives, then select the archive source I want to view the current page in. I suppose it works, but with that many taps it hardly seems any faster than just copying the url and pasting it in an archive.is bookmark. If anyone know a more efficient way please let me know.

Edit2: actually, changing this setting and reducing the included archives helps

I just got the update on my phone on Google play, Firefox now supports 3rd party password managers for passkeys (on android 14+). Just tried it, and I got prompted with my 3rd party password manager, so it works!

This should be redesigned. The dot-menu has close and bookmark options. There is more than enough to move these to the front. Dot-menu just adds more touch.

Going into quick settings or full settings from search result menu, I disable AI in Search Results. It goes away.

Opening Firefox again and searching it turns back on.

How can this be disabled in Brave permanently? Not only do I want to not wait for AI, it's trash to begin with.

TIA

Especially ones that you find useful on android Firefox, as they seem to be less popular?

Recently got to know about bookmarklets due to a thread here in this community itself:
https://lemm.ee/comment/12623456
^An unrelated question: Is there some way to link comments so that they are automatically opened in home instances for eveyone, like how we can link communities and usernames currently?^

Some interesting/useful bookmarklets that I know of:

1. Bullshit.js as mentioned in that link
2. dotepub. It does say that data is sent to their server.
   For some sites it's better than the inbuilt save as pdf option.
3. A bookmarklet that opens the current site in G-translate
4. Saw a bookmarklet which works like reader mode.

The freecodecamp article on bookmarklets maybe useful for those new to it(It helped me). It seems cool.
https://wiki.greasespot.net/User_Script_Hosting links to sources for userscripts. Most of them seem to be desktop-centric.

Which are your favorites? Any cool ones that you have made on your own?

Copied from reddit:

Firefox CTO here.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the weekend about the origin trial for a private attribution prototype in Firefox 128. It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one, and so I wanted to take a minute to explain our thinking and clarify a few things. I figured I’d post this here on Reddit so it’s easy for folks to ask followup questions. I’ll do my best to address them, though I’ve got a busy week so it might take me a bit.

The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance, and doing something about it is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla. Our historical approach to this problem has been to ship browser-based anti-tracking features designed to thwart the most common surveillance techniques. We have a pretty good track record with this approach, but it has two inherent limitations.

First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. Second, this approach only helps the people that choose to use Firefox, and we want to improve privacy for everyone.

This second point gets to a deeper problem with the way that privacy discourse has unfolded, which is the focus on choice and consent. Most users just accept the defaults they’re given, and framing the issue as one of individual responsibility is a great way to mollify savvy users while ensuring that most peoples’ privacy remains compromised. Cookie banners are a good example of where this thinking ends up.

Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away. A mechanism for advertisers to accomplish their goals in a way that did not entail gathering a bunch of personal data would be a profound improvement to the Internet we have today, and so we’ve invested a significant amount of technical effort into trying to figure it out.

The devil is in the details, and not everything that claims to be privacy-preserving actually is. We’ve published extensive analyses of how certain other proposals in this vein come up short. But rather than just taking shots, we’re also trying to design a system that actually meets the bar. We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.

This work has been underway for several years at the W3C’s PATCG, and is showing real promise. To inform that work, we’ve deployed an experimental prototype of this concept in Firefox 128 that is feature-wise quite bare-bones but uncompromising on the privacy front. The implementation uses a Multi-Party Computation (MPC) system called DAP/Prio (operated in partnership with ISRG) whose privacy properties have been vetted by some of the best cryptographers in the field. Feedback on the design is always welcome, but please show your work.

The prototype is temporary, restricted to a handful of test sites, and only works in Firefox. We expect it to be extremely low-volume, and its purpose is to inform the technical work in PATCG and make it more likely to succeed. It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting. It’s based on several years of ongoing research and standards work, and is unrelated to Anonym.

The privacy properties of this prototype are much stronger than even some garden variety features of the web platform, and unlike those of most other proposals in this space, meet our high bar for default behavior. There is a toggle to turn it off because some people object to advertising irrespective of the privacy properties, and we support people configuring their browser however they choose. That said, we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.

I have the search bar added to the toolbar which I use to either search straight from it or use it to bring up google.

It looks like in the latest update you can no longer select the text box, hit enter and get taken to the search page.

You have to enter some text before it does so.

Does anyone else have the same issue?

Now that Google and Microsoft each consume more power than some fairly big countries, maybe it's time for 2024 Mozilla to take heed of 2021 Mozilla's warnings.

Anyone else hate this? I don't want a dumbed down bar. If Im on the homepage, I want to know. Same as if I'm on a subpage.

This is in reference to Mozilla changing the URL to ALWAYS show only the domain. Absolutely terrible IMO. As for the double tall menu now? That is mostly fine.

At least give me an option to see the full url.

The founder of AdBlock Plus weighs in on PPA:

Privacy on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population. Advertising on the web is fundamentally broken, for at least 90% of the population.

Yet any attempt to improve this situation is met with fierce resistance by the lucky 10% who know how to navigate their way around the falltraps. Because the internet shouldn’t have tracking! The internet shouldn’t have ads! And any step towards a compromise is a capital offense. I mean, if it slightly benefits the advertisers as well, then it must be evil.

It seems that no solution short of eliminating tracking and advertising on the web altogether is going to be accepted. That we live with an ad-supported web and that fact of life cannot be wished away or change overnight – who cares?

And every attempt to improve the status quo even marginally inevitably fails. So the horribly broken state we have today prevails.

This is so frustrating. I’m just happy I no longer have anything to do with that…

Original toot:

It has come to my attention that many of the people complaining about #Firefox's #PPA experiment don't actually understand what PPA is, what it does, and what Firefox is trying to accomplish with it, so an explainer 🧵 is in order.

Targeted advertising sucks. It is invasive and privacy-violating, it enables populations to be manipulated by bad actors in democracy-endangering ways, and it doesn't actually sell products.

Nevertheless, commercial advertisers are addicted to the data they get from targeted advertising. They aren't going to stop using it until someone convinces them there's something else that will work better.

"Contextual advertising works better." Yes, it does! But, again, advertisers are addicted to the data, and contextual advertising provides much less data, so they don't trust it.

What PPA says is, "Suppose we give you anonymized, aggregated data about which of your ads on which sites resulted in sales or other significant commitments from users?" The data that the browser collects under PPA are sent to a third-party (in Firefox's case, the third party is the same organization that runs Let's Encrypt; does anybody think they're not trustworthy?) and aggregated and anonymized there. Noise is introduced into the data to prevent de-anonymization.

This allows advertisers to "target" which sites they put their ads on. It doesn't allow them to target individuals. In Days Of Yore, advertisers would do things like ask people to bring newspapers ads into the store or mention a certain phrase to get deals. These were for collecting conversion statistics on paper ads. Ditto for coupons. PPA is a way to do this online.

Is there a potential for abuse? Sure, which is why the data need to be aggregated and anonymized by a trusted third party. If at some point they discover they're doing insufficient aggregation or anonymization, then they can fix that all in one place. And if the work they're doing is transparent, as compared to the entirely opaque adtech industry, the entire internet can weigh in on any bugs in their algorithms.

Is this a utopia? No. Would it be better than what we have now? Indisputably. Is there a clear path right now to anything better? Not that I can see. We can keep fighting for something better while still accepting this as an improvement over what we have now.

Original post (not mine): https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e1rskb/mozila_needs_to_learn_that_chromes_uiux_is_not/

@firefox

Hi. I'm one of the millions of AFGNCAAP users of your browser, and have been since like 2005.

I've stuck with you through memory leaks, and through struggles loading basic sites, and through security issues at my bank because they were idiots and you were safer to use than they wanted you to be.

So... please. Don't start pulling a Chrome about giving my data to advertisers.

Adding tracking in is bad enough. Not opting out by default is worse. Not ASKING ME TO?! That's being petty.

Does anyone know why Firefox doesn't show favicons when resolving local sites via name.local but does when loading the same sites via their IP address? Having checked Vivaldi, the sites favicons appear just fine using that.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/18633655

I can't exactly make out what it says after the error code thanks to the mystery unicode characters but I will try my best.

"The package couldn't pass the updating, or verification."