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.
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.
@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.
@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. 🤪