Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are opt-in by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there.

Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/privacy-preserving-attribution

My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice?

Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

There's hope tho.

In Mozilla's earlier days, they jettisoned a totally new web browser project called Servo. It's sort of a ground-up effort to build a browser using the latest safety tech, like the Rust programming language.

https://servo.org

And the best part is, Servo is totally independent from Mozilla now and they have * independent funding * !

Meaning, Google isn't bankrolling Servo as anti-trust insurance (*cough* Firefox *cough*), so there's a chance it might actually take a real stance against adtech on the web.

Servo is faaaar from ready for general use yet, but it's picking up development speed. Definitely an option to keep an eye on for the future.

@cuchaz@gladtech.social And with the development history of Gecko's attempts at becoming portable and embeddable into other applications and web browsers, Servo may overtake it for usability from a development perspective sooner rather than later ​​

@cuchaz we expected such a built-in ads feature in chrome, but having it in firefox first is just awful.

@cuchaz I've moved on macOS to Safari and probably move to GNOME Web on Linux. The key element is that I've engineered myself out of browser sync feature and extensions by migrating all my passwords to https://www.passwordstore.org/. I still use browsers password manager for convenience and cache but not as an archive. I.e. they are not synced and I can delete all the passwords any time, as pass has the archive.

Other than I don't really care what the browser is as long as it is fairly modern (e.g. WebKit based). Safari and GNOME Web are reasonable, and I'd think that as they are not the selling product, they also minimize the harm, as it is not intended to make profit in any significant figures.

That said, not sure if I would trust Edge on Windows ;-)

@jarkko @cuchaz

What I am looking for in a browser is good ad blocking and syncing bookmarks and open tabs. Safari does not have good ad blocking on YouTube.

I end up using Firefox and Chrome, despite their surveillance and other problems.

I don’t know where else to go.

@railmeat @cuchaz Servo having a new life was best part of this story. I learned about Rust first time at LinuxCon EU 2014 but the presentation was about Servo. Rust was introduced as a tool to realize Servo.

It is really only web engine that has a realistic chance for feature par with Gecko and WebKit, which is purely open source, so it is in my opinion somewhat exciting.

@cuchaz doesn't "opt-in by default" actually mean "opt-out"? It's the action you need to make that's important here, not the state of the checkbox.

@vbabka yeah, sorry about that. My original wording was needlessly confusing. I've tried to fix it by editing the toot. If you can see the edits, the latest revision should hopefully be clearer.

@wolf480pl @cuchaz FFS accelerationism is a dumb af idea.

@dalias @cuchaz
Yeah, and it's unlikely that the idea from my last post would work. Betting on Google getting and losing an antitrust lawsuit would be stupid

But what frustrates me is that we can't incentivize Mozilla to stop doing bad things, because no matter how much badness they do, Firefox is still better than Chromium

Well that can't be true. Surely there is a threshold of badness where it doesn't make sense to use Firefox anymore. I think it's still far, but we should figure out where

@wolf480pl @cuchaz Beautiful analogy for the Democrats though. 🤪

@dalias @wolf480pl

@cuchaz Mozilla is really losing it... Thank you very much for this, I didn't know it even existed

@cuchaz will have a look when they support ublock origin and a few other vital extensions. @servo

@railmeat @cuchaz

Actually this nails pretty much what is wrong in politics/federal/legislation etc. side of this.

It is all about "a consumer must be able to pick a web browser". I think much more effective legislation tool for EU commission etc. would be to enforce the browser sync feature to be interoperable. Cross-browser interoperable.

That would lead into browser vendors to making a common standard for sync and world would be a better place, and more open for competition. E.g. then any open source web browser could adhere to this standard, including some antique like w3m for instance. Or browser made for old home computer.