I use Firefox. So does my family. Everything I make for personal use works in Firefox and I don't bother testing with anything else.
However, almost every web site or web app I make in my professional capacity gets tested with, and is expected to work with, ~95% of browsers. That means testing against Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Samsung Internet, and Internet Explorer.
Edit: I forgot to add Safari, which I also test with.
Anything less is not my brand of professionalism, because I am convinced my clients expect me to leave my personal thoughts and convictions at the door. If you want to only create sites that work in Firefox and maybe not elsewhere, then you can do that - but doing it ethically means telling the client upfront that you won't accept work that requires the site work for the widest audience reasonably possible.
That said, there are two caveats. The first is ethics. I do not leave my ethics at the door and if I am being asked to do something unethical I will refund the money and walk. If it is illegal it will be reported, as otherwise I am an accessory. Clients agree to this upfront. The second is client requests. If the client wants it to work in Firefox and they tell me not to bother with the other websites, despite my advice against it, then that's what I do.
Have you considered adding a comment linter to your CI process for posting to HN? Or am I the only one with an end-to-end K8 driven process for comment quality?
When I reread some of my comments, I realize that I often drop words. A fair number of times the meaning is the opposite of what I intended to say. Those cases usually contradict the rest of my post so people should be able to figure out the intended meaning, but it would be nice if it didn't happen in the first place.
I’ve noticed that iPhone autocomplete has at least some rudimentary intelligence built in - at the “Spell a word a certain way a few times and it begins to not correct it” level. It’d be nice for that to improve (instead of always replacing “an” with “and”).
Microsofts SwiftKey has the same, it's incredible. And according to the app you can (and I have) opt out from sharing my typing data.
Whwn I first encountered SwiftKey I just didn't understand how it could be as good as it is at predicting what I want to type. Even switching between Swedish and English (just by typing words from either language).
Whenever I use someone else's phone (to show them how to use something) I feel handicapped, I guess I'm clumsy on the keyboard.
I don't understand why Apple wants to prevent people using MacOS in VMs. The performance is so bad that no one in their right mind would use it as a daily driver, but people are using it to build/release software.
More software available on their platform should be a good thing, no?
Professionals will still buy machines for convenience (building/testing is a lot faster when every click doesn't take seconds) and pay the Developer Program fee, and us open-source developers can make our software available to Apple users, or make sure it works on Safari. Why make it illegal?
Maybe to preserve the illusion that Mac OS is inherently part of the computers Apple sells as opposed to a separate product that's linked to them artificially?
Until a court says otherwise I will continue to act as though it’s fair use. (Provided you’re not selling Hackintosh machines, which has gone to court but is clearly different from a personal setup.)
You are asking for sanity and ethics on the net. From advertisers. You must be insane.
I don't like this FLoC proposal either but to me I see it as a small leap in saying goodbye to mass cross-site spying that has been uncontrollably rampant with no present working solutions.
FLoC is a tracking mechanism. By replacing 3rd party cookies, this generally speaking means less tracking. 3rd party tracking + FLoC = bad bad. FloC only = less bad.
I started displaying a banner on my website [1] a while back for visitors using Chrome/Chromium telling them to "give Firefox a try for the future of the open web".
I don't know how many people came across that or clicked the link, as I don't track that, but I enjoy doing my tiny part in letting people know.
In what way is the site "optimized for privacy-respecting browsers" ? The browser is the thing being optimized. Does it mean to say that the website operators will intentionnaly not respect privacy of Chrome users but they will for Firefox ?
“Chrome users might experience issues” but what issues ? It reads like a dishonest TOS like the one used by service providers using catch-all statements to cover their backs.
It sounds like the old “optimized for Internet explorer and 837 by 394 resolution” for websites that were not optimized in any way but it was just the people behind it not able or unwilling to do better.
You could fill a website with privacy-invasive scripts from Google, like 100 copies of Google Analytics and another 100 copies of Google Adsense. This would make it optimized for privacy-respecting browsers which block these, and the website would become slower on Google Chrome thanks to Google's own scripts.
Without going to such absurd lengths, a lot of the APIs Google came up with to complicate the web and slow down browser competition are usually bad for privacy. A browser that blocks those will probably have better performance if the website has fingerprinting scripts that use a lot of those APIs.
> You could fill a website with privacy-invasive scripts from Google, like 100 copies of Google Analytics and another 100 copies of Google Adsense. This would make it optimized for privacy-respecting browsers which block these, and the website would become slower on Google Chrome thanks to Google's own scripts.
Degrading the user experience for one browser does not mean it's optimized for another. Nothing has changed for privacy-respecting browser, there is no optimization, there is no code specifically targeting privacy-respecting browsers. But there is code targeting non privacy-respecting browsers and this code is in the website, not the browser. So the responsibility falls on the website author to respect its user's privacy, not the browser.
Am I being pedantic ? I have issues with the verb 'optimize' in this context.
I would expect such a site to work well without third-party scripts, without JavaScript, and perhaps even without a GUI. I would expect it to provide full functionality on Firefox with aggressive uBlock settings and on text-based browsers. I would be surprised to see a cookie banner.
Mostly, I would expect the site to work quickly and deliver valuable information with minimal nonsense, while integrating well with power user tools based on web standards.
Don't see why you're being down-voted. That seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. Assuming, of course, the decision on compatibility is yours to make.
Paradoxically, it's consistent with part of the strategy google used to promote Chrome in the first place: make the dev tools good, to encourage developers to use chrome, so they'll optimise for it, so it'll become popular.
Privacy-advocating developers optimising for the browser(s) they believe are most privacy-respecting seems entirely appropriate. It's not anti-chrome, any more than those using chrome as their primary tool are anti-firefox (or whatever).
--
EDIT: noted that taking this decision requires the authority to do so.
It's no matter; I'm not here for the points. Personally I find it hilarious to be down-voted for stating plain facts about my own (demonstrably effective) development process.
So it is very likely that you do not live of being a web developer or have a very small niche market, given the market share of FF and the market share of chrome.
No normal buisness can ignore how the vast majority of its users experience their site. Every user with issues is likely a lost user.
But ... from a technical point of view, it is indeed very likely that what runs on FF will also run on chrome, but not necessarily the other way around.
> it is indeed very likely that what runs on FF will also run on chrome, but not necessarily the other way around.
Yes, one would expect that to be true. However, as a very heavy FF user I haven't noticed any breakage in pages at all. Might be there's small things in a side-by-side compare, but nothing annoying so far.
Not every website requires retention of every person in order to survive. In my case, my website is better because my user base is tolerant of a bit of jank. I consider it a win whenever someone leaves because of trivial crap.
Your "about" clearly states it: Some say I argue on the internet too much, but those people are wrong.
I don't know what you do/sell on said websites, but if you still have a job it means that those who hired you haven't received (enough) complaints yet.
I am not sure about that. Usually, when people only use Chrome to test and develop; Firefox/Safari users end up with problems. When someone tests on Firefox; things usually end up working on Chrome without problems.
This might be due to Firefox users being more aware of standards than just "whatever runs on Chrome today", or because Google tends to ship non-standard behaviour with their browser and make it a "standard" with their massive marketshare. Or it might be related to Firefox developers implementing the standards more carefully in order to protect their shrinking marketshare.
In my experience people get way more complaints when the developer uses Chrome and the user uses Firefox than the other way around.
I remember auditing the ebanking system for a bank a decade+ ago.
I was expecting that they perform their UAT on the prevalent browsers at the time. I don't expect/demand that people will UAT a website for "Pale Moon", but it is dangerous to not test Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera (and a few more) and in multiple devices/displays.
I have no expectation that a personal blog will display perfectly, but for some applications/websites every menu option, line, frame, must be perfecly visible as per the design, otherwise you get your Chrome users that cannot hit "send" to complete that funds transfer, and that won't keep you employed for long.
This. I develop against firefox only, internal apps for my company. It's been many years since something was funtionally crippled in Chrome. At worst some ugly UI elements.
Regardless, I’m self-employed and my website makes enough money that I can spend plenty of time arguing with people on the Internet. Your admonishments certainly aren’t going to be my undoing.
Tested only on privacy-respecting browsers? That's what sites mean when they have these "soft" banners on non-supported browsers. If it's not tested on chrome, then users on chrome might experience issues.
If you want a banner like this to succeed, you need to make the benefit personal to the individual. We all care about the open web. But not enough to move a finger.
No thank you. I appreciate what DDG is trying to do but in the end, a search engine that makes money from selling ads trying to protect me from another search engine that also sells ads is just feeding the ecosystem.
I am going to put my money into FF no matter how annoying some of the things in it are.
Really? I can appreciate not wanting to use DDG for a number of reasons, but because they are pushing for financial legitimacy on the basis that there can be an ad industry but it shouldn't be an arms race?
Yes thank you, please make a market out of privacy!
edit: I should probably say, please prove that privacy respecting markets are viable, I'm not suggesting the commoditisation of everything, lol.
I use DDG as my main search engine but I share the parent's concerns. In the end an ad-driven business model will always pit the interests of its users vs the interests of the advertisers.
Should DDG become ultra-successful, how long until they start making concessions to privacy to increase revenue and growth? After all not so long ago Google themselves were "the good guys" and we were willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Turns out that "Do No Evil" only really works until it starts clashing with "Make More Money".
Honestly I use DDG because in most cases the search results returned are more relevant. I’ll go to google if it’s something that could be explained by a YouTube video or Reddit thread or a Pinterest board, but Google really wants to push you toward the larger sites — even if the content is less relevant.
If I recall DDG doesn’t even use cookies. So they’re showing ads based solely on the search terms, which personally I’m ok with as long as it doesn’t clutter the page too much. Showing me ads when I’m in a discovery mindset is ok and is less intrusive; it’s way worse when you’re in a consumption mindset and the ads are just obnoxious (I’m looking at you, YouTube ads).
My experience with DDG has been the opposite of yours. The results some of the times are just annoying. Mostly because I want it to be good enough to replace Google with it. I click on a second page from results and it turns out to be some dead unattended page.
I gave up trying to be too optimistic about DDG and use Google with no javascript and no cookies saved on the domain in my browser.
My problem with search is a user one. Not an ethical one. When I search for something I want the best results. I don't care if some cute furry animal had to be sacrificed in the production of this utility.
Btw, DDG has a settings button hidden somewhere that allows you to tweak a few settings and save cookies if you wanted.
I had similar issues to you using ddg until about a year ago when I tried it again. the past year ddg has overall yielded a better experience than google for me, and I have been using it for 99% of my searches. I even forget I'm using ddg and not google, that's how seamless the results and quality are for me now. but when I had previously used ddg it was a nightmare, some time within the last 2 or 3 years ddg did something to serve up better result's
> Should DDG become ultra-successful, how long until they start making concessions to privacy to increase revenue and growth?
Should this happen then DDG will know better than anyone that this just puts a target on their back to be replaced by the next privacy respecting search engine, and the cycle continues afresh.
seems like they're coopting privacy awareness to advertise themselves. the site appears to be a walking talking duckduckgo ad, with just enough other content sprinkled in to seem like actual advice.
I mean it's not as nefarious as it could be since they are actually privacy focused, but this blend of advice and advertisement is rubbing me the wrong way
Under terms of an agreement, FF sends search bar queries to a "search engine that makes money from selling ads." The search engine belongs to an online ad services company. FF belongs to Mozilla Corporation. The agreement is between the ad services company and Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Corporation pays the salaries of the developers who maintain FF. Almost all of Mozilla Corporation's income, certainly 100% of their profits, comes from the agreement with the online ad services company. Sadly, donations are not what keeps Mozilla and FF in business.
Sure, DDG might be robbing Peter to pay Paul, but so is Mozilla. They sell out every FF user who does not change default settings. This must be a significant number of users, because the online ad services company pays millions to Mozilla for that "service". That means heaps of queries coming from FF are "feeding the ecosystem".
> "They try to get away from that model, though. Not very successfully [...], but they try."
Honest question: do they? What evidence supports the assertion that they do try? I haven't seen any story suggesting Mozilla is trying to get away from that model of funding Firefox.
> "(how to get people to pay for a browser?)"
The Thunderbird email client (formerly maintained by Mozilla) switched to being independent from Mozilla and asking for donations; so far they are successful. Donations are now sustaining a team of 15, thanks to yearly 2.3 M$ donations [1], and they keep hiring.
"A team of 15 isn't remotely enough to sustain Firefox", you may say, and you'd be right. But then, if Thunderbird is able to find enough donation money for 15, what would Firefox (who is way more popular than Thunderbird) be able to score if it found the courage to make its case to its users, and ask for money? Could it afford a staff of 150? More?
Indeed. If I buy a magazine then ads are targeted at readers of the magazine but they don't track me, invade my privacy, follow me around wherever I go or occasionally try to hijack me.
If a newspaper or online magazine had traditional ads that were embedded in the page as static images (no distracting video please) then I'd leave my ad blocker off.
Careful what you wish for. I go to a local website for local news, and they display five big banners which you must scroll through — one and a half screen — before you get to see the actual content, headline included.
True, those are not targeted ads, they are sponsored content, but I wouldn’t even bother setting up my adblocker, had they made them less annoying.
It always surprises me when people say that they're fine with personalised ads, even going so far as saying that if they're getting ads they want them to be personalised. I guess I _can_ understand why, they want them to be potentially useful if they're seeing them...
To me though, sure, show me ads, fine, whatever, but don't build them around a profile of me to try to manipulate me directly based on my potential interests and behaviour. Any time I can disable any "personalisation" of ads, I do.
I would be fine with actual personalized ads. Hell, I'd give them even more data if they needed it to accomplish such a feat. But the best they can do is try sell me washing machines after I've already purchased one, or show me youtube snippets of scenes from Netflix shows I've watched recently (yes this one really did happen. No idea how, still checking).
> It always surprises me when people say that they're fine with personalised ads
I think there's a bit of a language barrier. What advertisers mean when they say "personalized" or "relevant" is not the same as what their audience means when they use the same words. I find advertisers often mean "what you looked at but didn't buy," but I think most consumers mean "what is likely to interest me."
I use many Google services, and generated many records on their platform such as payment, cloud computing service, email, file storage. That is a lots of information, making me slowly losing my confidence on whether or not I can recover if someday Google turn their back on me.
My opinion is, if DDG is showing me some ads based on my search keywords (which is sort personalised) so they can make some money out of their not-so-bad service? Fine by me.
I wish there was a way to donate directly to Firefox. Unfortunately, the only option is to donate to Mozilla and they will likely use the money to fund their other initiatives and continue to neglect Firefox.
At the moment. Google also used to be known for providing better, mostly text based, ads that didn't spam you with popups or blinking animations. That did not stop them from becoming evil.
I guess the issue is how the ads are generated. adds generated on generic search terms are ok with me as long as they are well marked. ads generated on a deep and creepy level of privacy invasion, completely irrelevant to what I'm searching is not ok.
I'm content to live In a search world when I type "how to do xxxxx" an add for a software company that provides xxxxx as a service is the top two or three results. I'm not content with getting cold calls from salesmen 1 to 2 hours after I type in a search for gartner magic quadrant xxxxx. (this happens all the time)
if the ads served are keyword based on the current search, and clearly marked as add, I'm ok with it.
I even click on the ddg ads if the seem relevant on purpose, because I know it generates them revenue. I go out of my way to click on anything I know is a Google ad.
I’d never heard of Mojeek. While their mission is admirable, a few test searches using technical terms resulted in several suspicious sites. DDG search using the same terms provided results from commonly trusted sites. Obviously mojeek is new and will improve, but be careful out there.
uBlockOrigin already blocks FLoC in their privacy list and there are ideas to integrate it further as I understand [1]. So for all of us using that extension, there's no need to install DDG as well.
The "solution" of installing an extension is a bit shortsighted. Google can and will just remove the possibility for extensions to block FLOC in the future, when it's deemed profitable to do so.
It's not profitable yet because people can still switch to other browsers. When chrome has a monopoly, they will be gone in a heartbeat.
Also, look into what chrome recently did to the APIs adblocker extensions use, even in the current market google is already making adblockers less potent in chrome.
DDF is of course a search engine and doesn't need to be installed.
DDG now also has an extension which blocks FloC (a feature which the uBlockOrigin extension seems to not have full support for - correct me I could be wrong, but that looks like an open issue?)
So you can install the DDG extension now, or install the uBlockOrigin extension - but possibly have to wait for full integration.
I'll leave this quote from the EFF article on FloC[1]
> Google’s pitch to privacy advocates is that a world with FLoC (and other elements of the “privacy sandbox”) will be better than the world we have today, where data brokers and ad-tech giants track and profile with impunity. But that framing is based on a false premise that we have to choose between “old tracking” and “new tracking.” It’s not either-or. Instead of re-inventing the tracking wheel, we should imagine a better world without the myriad problems of targeted ads.
To me it seems FLoC is more about trying to stop a fingerprinting arms race between browsers and adtech, as will happen if third party cookies are removed and no other alternative is provided. In an ideal world adtech companies would just hold up their hands and say 'games up, on to something else' but it's an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars so if the more honest players leave the shadier companies will be only too happy to cash in.
Part of the problem is that I don't believe FLoC will stop a fingerprinting arms race.
FLoC in many ways makes it easier to fingerprint users, and I don't think that advertisers are going to look at the brand new opportunity FLoC-enhanced fingerprinting presents and just leave it sitting there untouched. There's nothing built into the FLoC spec that prevents advertisers from adding in additional fingerprinting on top of FLoC, and we've been down this road already with stuff like DNT. If any technology at all can be abused for fingerprinting, they'll abuse it. The market they're in doesn't allow them to have restraint, somebody will cross the line and then everyone else will follow under the excuse of being competitive.
So I'm just not willing to give advertisers the benefit of the doubt anymore, or to assume that if we meet them halfway they'll be satisfied. They've already burned that bridge, I'm not inclined to keep offering them new bridges to burn.
> we've been down this road already with stuff like DNT
Let's not forget that Microsoft deliberately murdered DNT by making it the default value. Had they not made that move, there's a good chance, we'd have seen DNT honored and eventually codified.
> They've already burned that bridge, I'm not inclined to keep offering them new bridges to burn.
I agree, if you give them no option whatsoever, there will never be legislation reining them in. With FLoC, you could outlaw other forms of tracking and add significant fines. Without it, politicians will not move a finger over concerns to damage the industry.
It is not Microsoft's fault that DNT failed; a privacy option that can't be turned on by default is not a real privacy option. Microsoft made the decision to turn on DNT by default because it determined that most of its users didn't want to be tracked, and the ones that did want to be tracked could go turn the header off. That's a very reasonable determination for any privacy-respecting browser to make. Users should be able to have defaults that closely align with their preferred user-agent behavior.
The reason DNT failed was not because of underhanded sabotage. It's because it got adoption. Advertisers were unwilling to remain in a world where the majority of people didn't get targeted. That's why I say they burned the bridge, because DNT's wide adoption was never a real option for them in the first place -- it's entire existence was predicated on the assumption that most people would not use it.
> there will never be legislation reining them in
We could do this anyway. We don't need to present an option ahead of time to make advertisers happy. I guarantee if you go to anyone in Congress and ask them why they're not supporting a privacy bill, they are not going to respond, "we would if better technology and standards existed for targeting." Senators and Congresspersons aren't thinking about browser standards in that level of detail. And if you're worried about advertisers lobbying, I do not believe that FLoC is going to make advertisers lobby less to block any privacy bill.
> That's a very reasonable determination for any privacy-respecting browser to make. Users should be able to have defaults that closely align with their preferred user-agent behavior.
I understand this as "Microsoft produced a privacy-respecting browser and had their user's best interest on their mind", and I find it hard to engage that, because we seem to be living in wildly different realities.
> We could do this anyway. We don't need to present an option ahead of time to make advertisers happy.
We won't, so let's enjoy the situation we have, because change in the right direction that doesn't get us 100% of the way is bad and we'd prefer to remain where we are right now.
Fair enough. If Firefox and Chrome enabled DNT by default, do you think the outcome would have been different? Ie, do you think that advertisers rebelled specifically because they thought Microsoft was hypocritical about tracking?
I don't. I don't think there's evidence that advertisers were mad at Microsoft, and the reasoning I have for that is that they stopped respecting DNT across the entire browser ecosystem, not just on IE. The other point of evidence I have is that advertisers are similarly angry about every other privacy-mechanism that gives users choice, even in browsers like Safari and on platforms like iOS.
I think my theory is a pretty consistently reasonable explanation for all of those scenarios. Why are advertisers mad about iOS privacy changes? Is it because Apple is hypocritical? Or is it because a lot of people use iOS, and advertisers don't want to see widespread adoption of any privacy tools? You can find a consistent correlation between how angry advertisers get about any privacy-enhancing proposal and the number of people it would impact.
> so let's enjoy the situation we have, because change in the right direction that doesn't get us 100% of the way is bad
I don't think that's what anyone at all is saying. I disagree that FLoC is a change in the right direction, and I disagree that it will make any legislation any more likely.
I could just as easily make the same point back to you. You're arguing that we should embrace a new tracking standard that makes privacy worse just because an arms race where browsers try to stop tracking entirely on their own isn't a perfect solution.
But an arms race where browsers close tracking vectors where they find them is better than a legal status quo where browsers add new tracking vectors of their own volition. And I don't see any evidence that adding FLoC is going to make US Senators feel better about privacy bills, or that it's going to change how advertisers lobby those Senators.
> Ie, do you think that advertisers rebelled specifically because they thought Microsoft was hypocritical about tracking?
No, but I don't think Firefox would've done that, because they had no interest in killing the feature (which was predicted to happen soon as they announced, certainly their smart people were aware of the consequences of their actions -- and they have very good connections to ad-tech, they're part of it, hence their understanding of the response and interest for the events to play out exactly like they did).
For Mozilla, I would have had a much easier time to assume good faith, for Microsoft I find that very hard to believe, much like their Shenanigans with IE on Windows and not allowing removal, making browser install hard etc wasn't done because they thought IE was the best browser and users couldn't possibly want to switch.
Similarly, I don't believe Google suggests FLoC because they want to protect privacy by any means necessary. But that doesn't mean that it's not better for the average user than what we have today. And we won't get any movement without Google.
> But an arms race where browsers close tracking vectors where they find them is better than a legal status quo where browsers add new tracking vectors of their own volition.
Two of the four major browsers are built by ad-tech companies, another one is almost entirely funded by an ad-tech company. That leaves Safari, and Apple has no intention to offer it to all users.
Google will not fight against itself (and it's the only relevant player on both sides), there will be no arms race. As for US Senators: who in ad-tech has more to spend than Google, Facebook, and Microsoft?
>Let's not forget that Microsoft deliberately murdered DNT by making it the default value. Had they not made that move, there's a good chance, we'd have seen DNT honored and eventually codified.
I always thought this was a naive take. People would say "Of course websites and ad services will respect DNT, it's in the spec!" as if that was a magic incantation that would prevent corps from tracking you.
I suppose you could, assuming the law had teeth and was actually enforceable in a meaningful sense.
But in my opinion, the idea that a flag begging companies not to track them would be respected was always a naive fantasy, regardless of whether it was turned on by default (because why wouldn't I want this turned on by default if it worked?).
Chrome is also hard-coding exemptions to Google and DoubleClick domains from their so-called privacy features.
This includes things like clearing the cookies leaving Google cookies alone, to sending a header with a browser ID to Google domains. I really doubt Google will get rid of all theirs methods to tie in their scripts on third-party websites to one user ID, as that will greatly reduce the effectiveness of Google Analytics or ReCAPTCHA.
Regardless of how simple fingerprinting is, I'm pretty sure that cookies are still the main way in which advertisers track users. Why make their job cheaper than it has to be?
I agree. What I wanted to point out is that this is not intended as a privacy-enhancing move by Google. More that they make life a bit harder for their own competitors.
I wish there was a way to whitelist SOME third party cookies in Safari - the only options seem to be all/none. Many “enterprise” integrations (Box in Salesforce for example) break if third party cookies are blocked.
Maybe Chrome doing it will get them assed to fix it.
The old tracking is stopping whether sites want to or not, since users are now wise to uBlock Origin and browsers have finally started pushing for privacy.
This isn't a false premise. Either you get the ad supported industry behind some solution or whatever privacy respecting solution will be incompatible with these sites.
Or the ad supported industry finds ways to be supported without ads. That would be the ideal outcome. It would align them with the needs of their customers.
To paraphrase something I saw on twitter recently: The ad supported industry needs to track users; users don't need the ad supported industry.
If the effort to increase user control and privacy continues, sites that can't support themselves without targeted ad revenue will either adapt or fold.
Google is trying to vilify browser cookies and slip in their proprietary tracking and profiling as a safe alternative. It's not better they simply want a monopoly on the dark arts of privacy intrusion, they want to build a moat and burn the bridges of the old way.
Is there an API that allows me to see, unpack, and set my own cohort? The FloC explainer [0] suggests the basic API just returns a stable hash [0]. I am curious about the space of cohorts. Also, whether there'd be an advantage to choosing a cohort for my task, vs just being anonymous.
Assuming my friend has a webpage and wants me to take look at it, or he is offering a webshop and knows my IP, or my notable User Agent. Or that I have an ATI FireGL graphics card installed, which is something which JS can query. He just asks me to visit a server he controls.
Will he now be able to query a list of properties of my personality? Interested in space, in biking, according to my Google Ad Settings also in Fujian, for whichever reason that is unknown to me?
I’m OK with ads and I’m even OK with personalised ads. I’m not OK with companies correlating my browsing with my real world identity or giving that data to governments.
Has anyone figured out some clever cryptography to enable personalised ads without the privacy concerns?
That's only while Google graciously allows to disable it at all. When Google will decide to make Floc permanent, these Chrome mods called Brave and Vivaldi will be forced to do it too.
I've seen enough corporations in my life to understand that unless we are talking about PR disasters (and Floc is not it) it is more convenient for corps to spin up some short announce why it something is actually "good for you" instead of doing hard to do and expensive actions like real code fork. People will grumble a bit and forget in a week.
I moved over to duckduckgo too, but what I've found is that when I'm searching for some esoteric bug Google is way more likely to give me a decent result, to the point that I'll literally switch back to google for those types of issues.
I think what we need is a search engine which doesn't draw it's revenue stream from selling users data and has it's own spider. DDG essentially is a wrapper around Bing.
DuckDuckGo works really well for 90% of my “searches,” which are basically asking for a specific Wikipedia article / blog / Twitter account / etc, so I don’t have to type in the full URL.
But I find DuckDuckGo really bad for some searches where I’m not looking for a specific domain:
- searching for papers or technical blog posts is almost useless in DDG. Software stuff in particular seems heavily front-loaded towards SEO trash and plagiarized blogs/“tutorials” instead of useful information. Pure mathematics is a little better (probably because there isn’t a “pure mathematics boot camp” cottage industry)
- political news is heavily slanted to the right, often prioritizing flagrantly disreputable sources. While this might be a userbase issue (lots of lonely white men) I do wonder if DDG (or someone in their tech stack) is putting their thumb on the scale (maybe this comes up in Bing as well? I haven’t checked). I realize people on the right might say Google is slanted to the left and don’t want to get in to that. But DDG seems to push more outright propaganda than Google. Google also returns plenty of conservative results for politics news/blogs, but it seems very rare for DDG to return liberal commentary (even from major sources like The Guardian).
Obviously this is anecdotal and colored by my own interests and biases. But, especially with computer science stuff, I have given up on DDG returning reliable results. At this point I basically only use them as a Wikipedia gateway.
Part of the reason I suspect Bing/DDG return right-leaning content is because grassroots US internet culture itself slants slightly to the right (as it slanted to the left back 10 years ago). Whereas Google pushes authoritative sources heavily, which tend to skew corporate-left.
Corporate content is less likely to push flagrant untruths (unlike grassroots extremists on either side), and what propaganda there is, is usually much more subtle.
It is a plain statement of fact that far-right politics and privacy-focused tech culture in the US are dominated by white men. It is a reasonable inference to suppose that this would explain why DDG tends to overly promote far-right search results.
You really don’t need to be a social justice warrior to understand my point. It is a shame if either of these completely uncontroversial statements offends you, but HN in fact truly does not need your centrist form of political correctness policing legitimate comments.
I'm not here to be offended, only to disagree with the framing (and provide the additional context I think is more productive for this conversation). You can make those comments all you like.
The ultimate reason I disagree is that the users of DDG don't seem to influence their algorithm. I don't believe DDG is treating users like Google (and shaping results based on interests of the userbase).
Are you based in the US? I found them really bad for localized results outside of the US, even when local mode is enabled (although that's annoying to do manually). In the end I used !g for so many search queries that I switched back again.
I'm in France, possibly I don't use the localisation feature much.
(I actually do use it occasionally to find specialist retailers so I don't have to use Amazon, as it's easy to buy from any other EU country here. German based retailers for audio equipment, or France based retailers if I want to buy cooking equipment etc)
I agree, for localised results Google is much better. I guess it depends what your normal search activity is to how much you'll notice the difference? For everyday searching I find DDG perfectly adequate and enjoy the ad-free, google-product-free experience. !G is handy sometimes though.
I've found that, it took me a few times to switch over. But I've found that even when I can't find something on DuckDuckGo when I try use Google I don't find it either. I wonder if that is now because I haven't regularly used in a few years and Google isn't able to guess what I'm trying to look for.
Second that, I'm using DDG in the FF. Have also enabled the same for the kids. Wife still protests but I'll switch it when she's sleeping.
Before writing the above I did double check this as I was not sure. So it is a sign that there is not much difference from other engines.
Localized results (in Ireland) are not that great though. But with time I just changed the ways around search queries. It is not really an issue anymore.
I switched to Brave/Safari combo and DDG about a year ago and Signal for messaging. DDG seems to work very well for me. I only resort to using Google is DDG can’t find what I am looking for and that doesn’t happen too often now a days.
As for Chrome, I simply don’t see any reason why anyone would use it over Brave. Brave seems to come pre installed with lots of privacy protection.
> it won't be long before people or organizations work out what FLoC IDs really mean, e.g. what interests and demographic information they are likely correlated with.
Isn't this good? I would rather set my actual interests in the browser settings! I also am upfront glad to tell them to anybody interested so we might find common interests or discover something new. The only reason I would rather hide such data actually is fingerprinting.
Most likely what you mean setting interests in the browser settings (general interests) and the FLoC cohorts are on much different scales. A FLoC cohort will probably contain a few thousand people, combined with any other data points will probably be enough to uniquely identify you.
Sure, I don't advocate FLoC itself (because I don't want to be uniquely identified through fingerprinting) but I'm not sure I understand why particular FLoC cohorts actual meaning being discovered is considered bad. I actually feel like I want that to happen so I could probably tweak my cohort consciously.
Besides the privacy implications, do you really want to only be served content that you have shown a previous interest in? Eventually this will lead to you living in an internet bubble that only ever shows you the same things. Would you be happy with that?
They need to ban user tracking already. The advertising industry was fine for thousands of years without it. Instead of tracking users, you put ads in places your audience likes. Google and the other ad networks don't like this, because if you're choosing the sites you want ads on, there's no reason to use them as a middle-man
Yeah, it's less profitable. But it's been proven to work since like 7000BC and it gets rid of all the privacy problems.
All the invasive FBI style user tracking only existed for ~20 years. A mote in the history of advertising. Anybody who tells you online advertising won't work without it is a liar.
On the plus side, maybe now people will see Chrome for what it really is. A vehicle and a weapon for Google to protect its shady business model. Just like Android.
I generally am on the pro-Firefox, anti-Chrome train, but there is one practical exception: websites that make use of in-browser audio synthesis often (in my experience) just don't work in Firefox.
Audible Genius's Building Blocks course has a in-browser DAW that you need to use Chrome for. Flowkey (browser-based piano lessons) also only works in Chrome, as far as I've been able to figure out.
So to anyone with an inclination, Firefox could use help on that front. Or if someone already knows of a Firefox-based solution, I'd be happy to use it. I just haven't found one yet.
Tried Audible Genius again just now to check, but still isn't supported, although now that I look at the console it looks like this may have something to do with their Meteor and analytics setup, so not audio related.
Tried Flowkey again now as well and although it required the Jazz-MIDI plugin (to permit the browser access to my MIDI controller), with that plugin I was able to use Flowkey in Firefox.
Just tried using it and was pleasantly surprised that it mostly worked fine with DWM (an X11 window manager), and it could play sound from my built-in sound card fine, even though I don't have pulseaudio.
However, once I switched to the external sound card, Firefox wasn't able to produce any sound (tried Youtube and some local videos); so I'll be staying with Chromium, unless some patched version of Chromium (with privacy improvements) makes its way to the Archlinux repos.
For better or worse, Chrome is still the browser to beat when it comes to newest browser APIs. My hobby project is an app that utilizes some of them and more than once I've found myself considering dropping support for other browsers. In principle I love Firefox but at the same time I'll have to wait at least a few months to start using the same APIs.
I mean, youtube doesn't work in firefox well. I can't count the number of times I had to restart the browser to play a youtube video. Google reveals it's not an uncommon issue on OSX. While I hated Chrome from the day one, I recommend it to people...
I try to sell friends and family on resisting Google's privacy invasions but lately it always goes the same way. "Yeah I know they know everything. How does that hurt me, like how does that cause me a problem in a real way that makes my life worse?" And I can't come up with a good answer for that.
Substitute Google with the Chinese Communist Party and most Chinese people right now have the same attitude as your friends.
How would those friends feel about Chinese people being able to gain their information independence from CCP? If they would be in favour, then at least metaphorically they answered their own question.
It's not something they care about at all. As long as the prices in Walmart didn't go up, about 90% of the people I know wouldn't care or even notice if China sank under the ocean. Trying to get people who've already accepted the US government spying on them to care about Google spying on them feels impossible.
If one honestly and genuinely believe Chinese people can get their news only from the CCP, one needs to consider fighting to gain his/her own information independence.
Yes, one does. Those who do fight to gain his/her own information independence including - as of now - a small minority of people in China with both the will and technical/political resources, should be well rewarded in doing so. It seems we may both be in favour of access to information independence. Wherever needed. The more the better.
> It groups you based on your interests and demographics, derived from your browsing history
For my whole life I have always been configuring my browsers to clear all history on close or disable it entirely. Is FLoC still going to work anyway? Is the history accumulated and analyzed on the server side?
One way to defeat these kinds of spyware techniques is to keep the browser permanently at a fixed address, such as localhost, and import content from other websites as necessary to a page at that fixed location.
I am considering adding web scrapping to this file sharing privacy application I have written that already works in the browser. I could screen scrape content from other sites using a proxy on the terminal per user request and once piped to the browser privacy is protect by single origin policy and by a separation of content from address. I could even make the experience look like an embedded modern browser.
I have (mild) worries about privacy from all over the tech spectrum in our day and age, and I can understand people having these worries about big tech such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Mastercard, Walmart, but the list must spread all over the space of tech, devtech, socialtech, fintech, edutech, insurancetech, govtech, medtech, citytech, and whathaveyoutech.
The problem is not constrained to Google Chrome, and the problem is certainly not solved by "taking side" in a made-up rivalry of Google Search and Duck Duck Go (childish to say the least)!
And I forgot very important gamingtech, and IoTtech ;-)
What I am getting at is that there is a paradigm shift in privacy consideration and expectations in the last two decades (on top of another shift the previous 2 or 3 decades).
We are living in a different age. The combat I read about in HN comments seems that of a rearguard... no offense.
Have any of you tried Ungoogled Chromium? I found it pretty easy to setup on Windows despite being someone who gets easily confused trying to do anything command line-esque.
Honestly, I'm grateful for Google implementing this. This means 3rd party cookies go bye bye and since It's Chrome everyone will rewrite their service to work w/o 3rd party cookies. Now i just have to block FLoC and sites will keep working for me. I might be ego, but i really couldn't give two shits about "the majority". I care about if I (and people in my close surroundings) can stay private or not.
Interestingly enough, I knew that I had the DuckDuckGo Extension already. But then when I checked for it in my icon list of extensions, it wasn't there... Went to the Google Chrome Web Extension Store, it said that I had this extension and it was Disabled!!! I don't remember disabling it myself... maybe I did, or was it Google? I did re-enable it though. Start your conspiracy theories...
The best way to get ppl to stop using chrome is to fork it, and add new experimental functionality that doesnt exist in chrome. I don't know if it's feasible but missing features in new platforms (e.g. VR) will motivate people to switch and then it will become a self-reinforcing loop. Integrating metamask in the browser could be a game changerfor payments and identity management.
There are lot of forks exist already. Microsoft Edge itself can be said as a fork. Although at present, Edge provides opt in on privacy options, we can't rely on MS product.
Will suggest to look into another forks like
Vivaldi
Brave
SRWare Iron
I started using Brave for past couple of months and don't have much of complaints related to browsing experience.
Brave browser is essentially Chrome with an integrated ad blocker. It also features rather unintrusive ads that compensate users with cryptocurrency for their attention and can always be turned off.
I support and promote brave, but i think they shouldn't just focus on the adblocking benefits, but they have the opportunity to bundle additional functionality that will be popular with both devs and users
If you care about your privacy, just don't use Chrome.
No matter how many extensions you add to keep trackers at bay, you're still using a product developed by a company that will keep pouring money into developing new ways to circumvent ads and tracking blockers.
The reason why Google can bully the web and get away with it is its market share. It's time to change that.
I would rephrase it to 'Do not build websites that work 100% fine and fast only in Google Chrome'. Unfortunately, this is the case and most of users just choose the most convenient tool, while trading their privacy.
I don't know man.
I was really happy about DDG existing and making an effort (although I am not a user).
But they now clearly shifted from a "Noble Actor" to a "Competitor" with this aggressive marketing. I don't appreciate these marketing campaigns that are directed at the competition. I never liked the "I'm a Mac"-campaigns, nor the all the "Bing"-fearmongering.
It signals to me that you're not a fighter for a noble cause, letting the product speak for itself, but actually in for yourself in the first place. I'm rather turned off by this.
Preventing noble actors from doing aggressive marketing causes them to stay small. Marketing is required to get market share nowadays. If the marketing causes people to find you to whom your are the better choice, then it is good marketing ⇒ https://www.draketo.de/anderes/honest-marketing
The kind of marketing is not only "aggressive", it is overly aggressive IMHO. It is vilifying, demonizing.
You can do aggressive marketing all you want, but in my eyes when arguments become hyperbolic, they get less and less believable.
The way they write their piece, FLoC is the worst thing that has ever happened, worse than everything that came before (how on earth is this worse than strictly personalized cookies all over the place?!) and only DDG and their extension can save you.
But why even try a different product if you don't know why it exists? And what makes it better? How do you communicate that?
Different messages have different appeals. Perhaps DDG's marketing "secret sauce" is word of mouth? And the message you don't like - as an admitted non-user - isn't meant to drive your behavior, but the WoM behaviour of current committed users?
I agree. I used to think both sides were about equal. And then one side got more extreme and did really bad things to lots of people. The other side called them out. I think calling them out wasn't very nice, so they're basically twisting my hand forcing me to ~vote~ select the extreme option. Not my fault.
I actually love how multiple profiles are implemented in Firefox.
I have a keybinding on my system to launch "firefox -P" so that I can pick which profile to launch an instance of right away. I juggle between 5 different profiles at any time and it works exactly as I'd like it to. Additionally, it is much easier to do than setting up a complex multi-account container setup.
Yeah, looks like a straight upgrade from Google Chrome. It's got a built-in ad blocker even on mobile. There's a built-in ads platform which actually pays people for their attention and can be turned off.
All it needs to compete with Firefox is browser extensions on mobile.
In my humble opinion if you're using Windows 10 there's no reason not to use Edge because you're already allowing Microsoft to invade your privacy.
But Firefox is a good browser and "morally" a better choice for many reasons others have already summarized.
Personally I use Edge as a developer because it's a Chromium browser (so it reflects most of my users' experience and works with a lot of tooling developed for Chrome), I already use Windows 10 and VS Code and it comes preinstalled.
But I used Firefox between the initial release of Quantum and the release of the new Edge browser and while there are both benefits and drawbacks to its dev tooling, it's definitely a good browser and purely on a quality/UX level I see no reason not to use Firefox.
> if you're using Windows 10 there's no reason not to use Edge because you're already allowing Microsoft to invade your privacy
If Edge was still using its own layout engine, I would agree with this. But even on Windows 10, by using Edge you not only trust Microsoft, but also help Google's takeover and control of the internet.
Using Safari, Internet Explorer, Links, Firefox or Serenity Browser all help a bit by reducing the Google browser marketshare. Using Brave, Edge, Vivaldi or Opera still help, but to a much smaller degree.
> In my humble opinion if you're using Windows 10 there's no reason not to use Edge because you're already allowing Microsoft to invade your privacy.
Oh, serving them your browsing history on a silver plate isn't really the same as letting them infer it from the scraps they could get from other browsers.
Google Chrome Vivaldi or Google Chrome Brave - these are completely correct names, until they will fork Blink and start making different decisions from Chrome. I mean really different, not just setting different defaults in the code Google provides, like with Floc.
PS: and speaking of Chrome mods - Edge is arguably the better one out of all of them. At least with MS we know their policies and main source of revenue, unlike with Brave or Vivaldi.
Vivaldi uses the Blink rendering engine from the Chromium project, itself just a fork of WebKit, but the application code is not from Chrome or Chromium (no code comes from Chrome, AFAIK.)
Chromium is an extremely convenient excuse for Google, but we all know that it is nothing more than a trailing version of Chrome with some modifications. Chromium is not a hard fork of Chrome and never was. Every significant change Google wants appears there too. Yes code, does come into Chromium first but that's just and extra step, meaningless really. Google carefully checks that anti monopoly laws wouldn't affect their second main cash cow.
Firefox is by far the superior browser for all your casual needs: browsing, reading, tweeting, banking, etc. It's good enough and fast enough but where it excels are addons.
Adblocking works so much better on Firefox. It blocks even the mere shadow of ads, like "skip this ad" button on YouTube, no promoted tweets, no warnings about cookies, GDPR, ads and nonsense almost cease the exist.
And Tree Style Tabs provides both ascended aesthetic and unparalleled usability. Where Chrome monits you with some annoying popup about tab groups, Tree Style Tabs brings order effortlessly.
This is not a choice between a better browser that tracks you or whatever and some FLOSS alternative that sort-of works. There is a clear winner on merits and it ain't Chrome, not for this crowd, anyway.
> Search with DuckDuckGo by Default — install, and we'll set your default search engine and homepage to DuckDuckGo Search so you can start your Internet searches without being tracked.
This wasn't mentioned in the article, and it's the second bullet point in the description on the FF extension page (and it's worded differently on my end too). I was interested in using it purely for blocking trackers.
I would much rather have personalized ads than have the early 2000s ads (hot single ladies, making $100k a day, etc.).
It seems to me that no matter what Google does, there will be pitchforks ready. What is so horrible about FLoC if I as the user am protected and my personal identity is kept in check, and only contained within my browser.
I'll stop using Chrome when there is a better alternative.. Firefox is a downgrade in each aspect, Edge is Edge (lol) and you can put a gun to my head but I won't use Safari, I have no idea how someone can even use Safari, the UI is so unintuitive, and they tried making it so simple that it is a pain in the ass to do anything more advanced.
They use your browsing history. That browsing history used to be sacrosanct: We spent years fighting to get every bug fixed through which even parts of the browsing history could be leaked.
Now Google controls the browser and simply accesses the browsing history and hands a processed version of it on a silver platter to advertisement-sellers.
No. Since you mentioned 2000s, you know how revolutionary and welcomed were Google ads at that time. Text based ads all in specific positions? Give me more! It was so much better than the nightmare we had.
But look at Google and web now ... it's back to square one, now with extra spying on top.
However, almost every web site or web app I make in my professional capacity gets tested with, and is expected to work with, ~95% of browsers. That means testing against Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera, UC Browser, Samsung Internet, and Internet Explorer. Edit: I forgot to add Safari, which I also test with.
Anything less is not my brand of professionalism, because I am convinced my clients expect me to leave my personal thoughts and convictions at the door. If you want to only create sites that work in Firefox and maybe not elsewhere, then you can do that - but doing it ethically means telling the client upfront that you won't accept work that requires the site work for the widest audience reasonably possible.
That said, there are two caveats. The first is ethics. I do not leave my ethics at the door and if I am being asked to do something unethical I will refund the money and walk. If it is illegal it will be reported, as otherwise I am an accessory. Clients agree to this upfront. The second is client requests. If the client wants it to work in Firefox and they tell me not to bother with the other websites, despite my advice against it, then that's what I do.