> I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution

You're holding out for the feature built by former Facebook ad executives, who started the company Mozilla bought [1] to help advertisers get around Apple's ATT [2], to develop a privacy-respecting standard?

What you describe can be done. But it would need to happen at a public-interest group, e.g. Wikimedia or noyb. Not an ad seller.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/former-facebook-execs-launch-st...

> actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private.

What depth is required? PPA means that my browser is doing the spying instead of a third party directly. That's certainly a privacy improvement, but I don't consider it sufficient.

"Sufficiently private" is a subjective call. I don't want to be spied on. Whether or not there are technological "privacy preserving" features baked into it doesn't alter that fundamental fact.

All that said, this isn't a bad enough move to get me to stop using Firefox, as long as I can keep it disabled. It does mean that I have to view Firefox with suspicion, though. I can't consider the browser to be my "user agent" anymore.

Why would an ad company ever use this instead of tracking users? Even if it exceeded <5% of users (or whatever Firefox has these days), why not just keep tracking and add this one more data point? It's a little like how "if you aren't paying, you're the product" turned into "if you pay, you're still the product".

> It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature.

For me, yes absolutely.

> If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

I'm done playing ball with the ad industry and I have lost all trust in them. They will grab what they want to grab. It will provide less data than the current solutions so the ad industry will just continue with what they have.

> Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away.

Not sure it's as strong as you suggest. I read the recent fight between Youtube vs Addblocker more as a weakness and a bit of hope that it might make YT less user friendly and could help other platforms.

> They deserve privacy too.

I agree so helps them install blocker and stuff like Consent-O-Matic instead of sneaking in features to help advertiser on their browser ... Using PPA does not bring any privacy unless I missed a meta anouncement that they disable tracking when ppa is activated ?

Why do we need tracking for advertising though? I wouldn't mind ads based on the page content (as much). Social media websites know their users anyways, no need IMO to track users across other websites.

I think the economic problems of the advertising industry shouldn't be of interest to my user agent. On the contrary, technically browsers could have more anti-tracking capabilities and I think even ad fraud is fully permissible.

There are problem with the attention economy and a lot of people suffer under it. Artist and journalists come to mind immediately.

In the end I am now seriously looking for alternatives to Firefox because I believe that Mozilla has list it in recent times.

> subsidize your browsing

Well, I do not have the option to pay for a privacy preserving browser, so I don't.

> The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

That's just not true.

TV, newspapers and magazines supported themselves just fine using zero tracking on the advertising they ran. That is still an alternative for websites today. We could shut down every single method of tracking user's actions in a browser, and WidgetCo would still pay to advertise using static ads on the widgetclub.com website with no more privacy invasive data that the webserver page views and the click throughs to their destination urls.

Doing that would make _some_ of the forms of advertising polluting the web these days uneconomical, but seeing fewer Temu ads or "sponsored content" or "around the web" blocks filled with scams, conspiracy theories, and political donation begging at the bottom of every page on half the websites is a good outcome not a bad one.

The idea that advertisers are owed any more data than that, or that the developers of web browsers need to bend to the will of the surveillance capitalists is insane.

Sure, if you choose to run a "free" web browser developed by the DoubleClick advertising company (masquerading as a web search company), then I guess you have to expect the browser to serve that advertising companies interests more than your own.

But most of us expect more than that from Mozilla. They are _supposed_ to be on our side.

"Privacy preserving Advertising" is bullshit. Just do context based ads.

Oh you're in a car subreddit? Maybe show car ads... instead of hyper personalized diet ads for my fat ass...

Advertising is not hard to do without collecting tons of data, it's just a little bit more expensive if you can't target that well. I don't care. Only they care about that.

You had me until the end. They won't, incentives for everyone involved surpass their greatest dreams or capability.

While we're worrying about how money keeps flowing, there are actual adversaries.

> because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing

We had open source browsers before.

Honestly yes

> To make matters worse, Mozilla has turned on its “privacy preserving attribution” by default. Users have not been informed about this move, nor have they been asked for their consent to be tracked by Firefox.

So more privacy by default is bad? What kind of inverted logic is that?

> If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away

Obviously

At some point, this exagerated antagonism causes more troubles than it solves

This is the same logic of people who think rent controls do anything but cause more problems than it "solves"

[dead]

Orion is neat but you're going to loose a lot of extension support.

Librewolf on the other hand is 99% Firefox, for the better (extension) and for the worst (clunkiness).

I've been down this road, honestly just stick with Firefox and disable the relevant setting. It's not worth the time.

Tried it for some days, on iOS and macOS. It still has bugs, and extensions don't work as good as they should. Sometimes they don't work at all. The UI is a a little buggy, but that's acceptable.

Worst thing for me is that it's closed source. They can claim whatever they want, if they can't prove it, I cannot really trust them.

I used Firefox long ago, before I switched to Mac.

Because of crippling defects in Safari (pages just not loading, hyperlinks not being recognized as such, clicks doing nothing), I decided to go back to Firefox. This was made feasible by the availability of a bookmark-syncing facility across devices.

But... wow it's painful. On mobile, the bookmarks are buried under layers of inexplicable and unneeded menus. It's infuriating to use.

On the desktop, the storage of log-in credentials is only half done. It'll remember what user ID you might have used for a site, but it then fails to select the password associated with that ID. It just presents a giant list of every password for every ID you might have used on the site. You have to scroll through them all, and sometimes there are duplicates. Why?

Then there's the inability to specify that new tabs should open on your home page. Instead, new tabs have to open on the Mozilla home page, which presents a search bar that's useless. When you start typing in it, a giant search panel erupts from the top of the screen and the cursor jumps into it. WTF? Who thought that was good design?

I will probably just go back to Safari, because I refuse to support Google's shit. But what's going on with Firefox? They're putting dev time into the garbage reported in this article, and ignoring glaring defects that are driving Firefox's already tiny market share away.

FTR the feature is also implicitly disabled if you have telemetry disabled.

I wish more privacy advocate websites mentioned this. Not sure what these one-sided stories achieve other than pushing "might as well use Chrome then" conspiracies.

I'd not use Orion. They can barely build a working search engine, I don't trust them one bit to code a secure browser

This is a false narrative not backed by their actual communication about the feature:

https://reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1e43w7v/a_word_about_p...

(Note that additionally when this post was written, the feature did not even truly do anything. It was running on an empty allow-list: https://mastodon.social/@jamesh@aus.social/11283474253494310...)

The most annoying aspect is that Mozilla is now an ad network with a pressure for users to view adds. uBlocks days on Mozilla are counted.

This article doesn't describe the function in enough detail to convey why it's a problem. So if you know why it's actually a problem, by all means share with us.

And you must use a Modern Corporate Browser to access Essential Workplace Applications.

Is Mozilla still receiving money from Google for making Google search the default?

Chrome is literally owned by an Ad company

Yep, despite the best intentions, once you have a funding stream it can become a controlling force on the overall direction of a project.

The alternative is to either have the user pay for it or have little to no funding which is a dead end in its own fashion.

Is this feature enabled on the mobile app?

If it's disabled (greyed-out), then you already have telemetry disabled.

Because this went viral a few times now

Per Mozilla

> The technology aims to demonstrate a way for advertisers to measure overall ad effectiveness without gathering information about specific individuals.

If it doesn't collect personal data, does it fall under GDPR?

There are already a plenty of forks.

We need another player on the field. https://ladybird.org/ looks very promising.

For comments like these I wonder how a Firefox developer would read it. You're doing an honest job on an open source browser, fixing bugs, patching vulnerabilities, adding features to keep up with web standards, knowing virtually nobody pays for it — Google needs to fund your paycheck because no one else can be arsed. And then you see opinions like the ones in this thread about how evil you "obviously" are and how you're supposedly milking the brand name

> painfully obvious [that it's] time to fork Firefox and kick Mozilla to the curb

What's probably painful and apparently not obvious is how many developer hours go into upkeep and staying current for a modern browser (to me, they seem about as complex and elaborate as your average operating system, not that that's necessarily a good thing)