German Firefox users to test recommendation engine 'a bit like thought-reading' Mozilla has decided to experiment on its German users by opting-in around one per cent of them to a search recommendations service that slurps their browsing histories. The recommendations will come from Cliqz GmbH, an outfit in which Mozilla has made a “strategic investment”. Cliqz says its browser offers optimal privacy but …
Firefox ESR will catch up with the stupid soon enough. June 2018, Firefox 52 ESR ends, and then you're stuck with 59, with all of the stupid changes they will add for three more versions. It's a stop-gap at best.
A better bet is Waterfox, which is a lot like FF ESR, only without the expiration date. The telemetry is all removed; it's not even an option you can turn on or off. NPAPI is still there if you need it, and the addons still work like they do now.
If not that, then there's Pale Moon, which forked from FF before Australis was inflicted, so Classic Theme Restorer really isn't necessary. It's faster and more stable than ever, but it doesn't support e10s and probably never will, so that's why I am using Waterfox now.
Still, as far as the poll, there definitely needs to be an option for "I am moving, or have moved, to a Firefox dertivative, such as FF ESR, WF, PM." I could not answer the poll, as there was no suitable choice.
Waterfox ok on W7 64bit. According to the blurb it seems it doesn't support W7 32bit.
Only glitch was that it thought the FF session that was open was a Waterfox. Held held up the install until FF was closed. Copied all the FF bookmarks and "pop-up" exceptions ok. Creates its own copy of data separate from FF.
For a long while, gmail moaned about palemoon being an old version of firefox but appeared to work OK. However, it's now started to fail : it seems to miss some sort of timeout or callback such that it doesn't save changes back to the email server, and then complains that unsaved data exists. Sometimes you can get around this by refreshing the page and sometimes you just have to start again.
Slack also refuses to work with palemoon. But that's easily fixed by not using Slack.
"Is WaterFox usably stable yet then? It used to make the firefox alpha versions look rock solid last time I tried it."
I've never seen that myself, but I haven't been using Waterfox for that long. I used it before Mozilla had an official 64-bit version of Firefox on Windows, and I tired of the constant crashing that actual Firefox was doing all of the time, apparently because of contiguous memory issues. When Mozilla came out with the beta for FF x64, I tried that and found it to be excellent, so I moved to that simply because it was a more recent version of the FF base (more security fixes, etc) and it worked just as well as Waterfox. The FF x64 beta was more stable than the x86 official release from the very first day the beta was available, for me at least.
I used Firefox x64 (in beta or eventually release form) from that point until quite recently, when the growing annoyance with Mozilla (and the upcoming addon armageddon) gave me the impulse to switch back. It's been just as stable and responsive as FF x64, with no crashing or hanging at all.
Mozilla has shown that they don't want to listen to those of us who don't want the powerful addons removed, but fortunately, FF is open source, and when an open-source project loses the plot, as they often do, forks are bound to happen. In this case, it's an existing fork that was created for another reason initially, but it fits what we need perfectly. Hopefully it will continue to be so going forward-- I would hate to contemplate having to decide between using an out of date browser version and using one that has a terrible UI that can't be fixed.
Waterfox had some kind of a deal with Ecosia for search (I had never heard of it before seeing it in WF), but now apparently that's changed to Yahoo. I've actually been using that lately and I have been pleasantly surprised by it... I was always a user of Altavista since it first appeared (before Google). I liked it and used it through the acquisition of Altavista by Yahoo, but one day the search results just began to be terrible. I noticed that on the bottom of the search page it said "powered by Bing," so I did some reading, and found out Yahoo had dropped their own search in favor of a partnership with Bing-- and it made things a lot worse. That was when I finally switched to Google. I'd never really used it before then.
Google was OK, but over the years, it has gotten really much worse at finding what I need. Reverse image searches that used to properly identify a given celebrity now come back as "female" or "arm" or "human," or other similar things equally worthless, and the more common text searches often return a lot of irrelevant crap. Not only that, but when I try to exclude certain results by negating the search term, it sometimes returns them anyway, and when I try to enter an exact phrase in quotation marks, it still finds bits and pieces of the phrase rather than the whole thing as entered.
I was trying in vain to find a given part number for a laptop part the other day in Google, and in frustration, I tried searching in the other search options in Waterfox... DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, StartPage, and Yahoo. Yahoo in particular stood out; it found what I needed on the first try, where Google had failed. That's when I noticed that it doesn't say "powered by Bing" anymore, and when I searched that specific topic, I found out that Yahoo and Microsoft have apparently gone their separate ways. Is Yahoo using the Altavista search technology they acquired all those years ago once again? It does have that feel-- and I like it. It's the default search again, for the time being anyway.
Google's gotten so bad that it's hard to find anything anymore, now that they are apparently more focused on trying to prevent search engine optimization without paying them than trying to return relevant results to the user, and it requires deliberate countermeasures to prevent tracking. I have Google screaming at me multiple times a day that a "new" device has signed into my account, since it can't find its cookies, which is deliberate on my part. I sign in just before doing anything that uses a Google sign-in, like posting this reply, then clear the cookies once again as soon as I am finished. I don't search while the cookies are present (while I am signed in), nor do I use any other Google service while signed in. My IP address is dynamic, so it changes once a day at least, so it's at least a little harder to track me than Google would prefer.
I've sent feedback to them about the stupidity of me receiving so many "security alerts" spams that if there was ever a real issue, I'd never be able to see it for all of the false alarms. Of course, then I am explaining to Google why I clear cookies so much, and the answer is "because you're Google," which is not likely to strike them as a good reason-- if my feedback, one among what is surely millions, is ever actually read anyway, which seems doubtful. By a human, at least; I know that all the stuff you do with Google is being read and analyzed by a machine.
've sent feedback to them about the stupidity of me receiving so many "security alerts" spams that if there was ever a real issue, I'd never be able to see it for all of the false alarms.
I find it quite silly that. If I sign into my account from a new device Google sends a warning email. To the same account. Said warning email showing at the top of the page.
If I was some nefarious bastard up to nefarious things, first thing I'd do is kill the warning message. Victim would never see it.
(That said, Google only has the account, no "rescue" email and no phone # etc.. Maybe if you have one of those set up gmail spamssends a warning to them?)
It looks like I was wrong about Yahoo... I saw that it does indeed still say "Powered by Bing." I guess the improvement I saw was fine tuning of the Bing engine, or else my evaluation represented too small a sample size, and that I will discover in time that Google is still better. As for the article I read that said that Yahoo and Bing were on the outs... I have no idea about that. I guess they patched it up!
I don't trust MS OR Google, really. MS is more sneaky and underhanded, but Google has far deeper tentacles across the web to grab one's information.
Thanks for the pointer. I hadn't come across Waterfox, and was looking for an alternative when NoScript stopped working properly in the most recent Firefox update [1]. I looked again at Vivaldi, which is nice in a lot of ways, but their script blocker didn't seem to have the functionality of NoScript, and the killer is that they don't support nested bookmark folders. Heck, I've got bookmarks nested five and six deep. I just grabbed the Waterfox binary package from https://www.waterfoxproject.org/blog/waterfox-55.0-release-download, and it has imported all my Firefox settings, and seems perfectly stable, though the console is full of Javascript warnings!
Thanks again. Enjoy a pint!
[1] Scripts were being blocked, but the UI to control NoScript was missing, and the extension was labelled "Legacy" :-(
@ Jonathan Richards 1
"...but their script blocker didn't seem to have the functionality of NoScript"
Vivaldi does not supply a script blocker. However, being based on Chromium gives you have access to the Chrome Web Store for extensions, including many different script blockers. I use uBlock Origin for script blocking (you need to enable Advanced Mode) which I personally find just as powerful as No Script, but I do accept that No Script is considered the pre-eminant script blocker.
"and the killer is that they don't support nested bookmark folders. Heck, I've got bookmarks nested five and six deep"
I'm not sure what happened with your nesting, but if you see the linked screenshot, you'll see I've nested them 8 deep, with no sign of not being able to go further.
Screenshot of nested bookmark folders in Vivaldi:
https://i.imgur.com/rQecsYJ.png
"Waterfox ok on W7 64bit."
Spoke too soon. After less than a day's light use it hung completely and could only be abandoned with Task Manager. When restarted it complained it couldn't find its data files - possibly the abandoned task was still holding on to them. It now starts again ok. The hang up seemed similar to recent Firefox misbehaviours.
If Firefox has a given issue that makes it unstable, it's probably in Waterfox too. Waterfox is almost completely Mozilla code, with just a handful of changes. For now, anyway. The more the two diverge in time, the more likely they are to have separate issues that don't exist in the other.
Firefox ESR will catch up with the stupid soon enough. June 2018, Firefox 52 ESR ends, and then you're stuck with 59, with all of the stupid changes they will add for three more versions. It's a stop-gap at best.
Not to worry, by then the planet will be a pile of smouldering rubble.
I recently thought I'd picked up malware, when I saw the Screenshot Beta icon on my toolbar, with no previous mention of it, 53.04 I think I first saw it.
Embedding Beta code that takes screenshots directly into a browser that upload directly to the cloud? That's what extensions are for Mozilla, so users have a choice.
This has to have been paid by 'you know who', to be embedded into the actual code, Mozilla's new way of generating income. So indirect 'backdoors' are OK, Mozilla? i.e. have all the code there within the browser to take screenshots, record sound, upload to the cloud, remotely but without directly enabling an exploit.
Also, searching About:Config, why is screenshot tag:
devtools.screenshot.audio.enabled ;true
Why does this record audio, if it's a screenshot extension.
You can disable screenshot using:
extensions.screenshots.disabled ;true
It's apparently been brought across from the developer version of Firefox and tarted up.
I'm not sure why they get rid of Tab Groups saying metrics say nobody uses it, then they put this in which probably even fewer people will use.
How about keeping Screenshot/Audio recording as an installable extension?, then there is a real choice and there can be no situations/no code within the actual browser code where this get enabled either by malware or exploit 'by mistake'. It's called ring fencing.
This is an indirect backdoor for Amber Rudd types. It's so fcuking obvious, talk about putting things in plain sight, to make things appear innocuous.
If I need a screenshot/record audio, I'll install an extension to do that, how about that? Now that seems fairly straighforward to me, not embedding this sort of code directly into a browser. Mozilla is asking for trouble doing this, but as said, maybe that's the point.
Well it's either that, best test in Germany, or everyone at Mozilla has decided to commit professional suicide. Thinking about it, probably both.
Palemoon user here since it was first mooted. 64-bit was a thing for me then as it is now. Chrome's also installed and gets all the social media/brain-dead sites on one program leaving Palemoon for serious things.
"Chrome's also installed and gets all the social media/brain-dead sites on one program [...]"
On my browsing PC I keep Chrome for BBC iPlayer - which insists on me having to log in.
I can then read the BBC news on FF or WF without the BBC iPlayer login tracking which articles are being viewed. I do not like being tracked across different sites - even if it is intended to "improve the experience".
On my development machine I use Chrome for a Selenium web trawling application - and that needs a Facebook login. That is never logged in on my browsing PC.
At this rate it is going to be a PC (or VM) for each type of use.
I agree - I know that the "loud" people from the Land Of The Free™ always want "to share" the stipulations in their constitution. With that in mind it might be good if they then took also a look at the constitution of another country, like in this case Germany..?
Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz, GG)
http://germanlawarchive.iuscomp.org/?p=212
Just for fun, take a look at Article 10... O dear... Getting the popcorn...
There's not much money in that though.
There might have been if they'd stuck to their guns with Firefox OS for TVs.
Perhaps they could push a tip jar, either teaming up with one (or more) or making their own. They could scrape a small commission, and it would do something about the stranglehold that advertising has on the web.
"Shame they didn't learn that lesson and just started stuffing Firefox with unnecessary features instead."
You mean the product that became Seamonkey. That's my preferred option - all the bits I want in one box. I just keep Firefox around for the occasional job when I need a site that doesn't work with everything firmly bolted down in the way I have Seamonkey set up. And there are very few that pass the "need" threshold.
I'm fine it with if there's a switch to disable it.
That basically means you're NOT OK with it, or you would not want that switch :).
I am against this - this is the ever returning itch to monetise a large user base. I would only consider that if the people who decided that would openly publish the data gathered from themselves for the last half year or so. That is about as likely to happen as me agreeing to "share" my personal browsing habits, benign as they are*.
* No, seriously, but -for example- if you start looking up gun details after yet-another-massacre and get swept into a series of Youtube videos about those guns, it can be used later as evidence that you are "obviously into guns", and so it is with your entire search history. Selective use of "evidence" ripped out of context is standard fare these days, coupled with the fact that you're usually manoeuvred into a position where you're prevented from giving that context. Beware of statistics (and personal details) in the hands of those who know how to abuse them.
Whatever evil Mozilla is able to do with what they collect is dwarfed by what Google does. Anyone complaining about this who ever uses Chrome has no leg to stand on here.
Am I happy that Mozilla is doing this? No, I'm not, but I realize they need to find ways to make money to keep developing their browser and provide the only real alternative to Chrome Linux users like me. This is hardly the only browser default that I'd change, so as long as they let me shut it off like I said I'm fine with it. The alternative of a Firefox-free world completely dominated by Chrome is far far far worse.
So I'm more or less tied to Firefox because I use bookmarks and those seem to have fallen out of fashion with the other browsers. Even with extensions, there's just no substitute for the Firefox bookmarks sidebar.
Please! If I am wrong, tell me where to look for an open-source, secure and standards-compliant browser which supports both Adblock Plus and a proper bookmark experience. Honestly, those are the only two features that I want from a browser.
So I'm more or less tied to Firefox because I use bookmarks and those seem to have fallen out of fashion with the other browsers
Huh? Bookmarks feature in Firefox, Safari, Opera and Vivaldi and can be easily imported and exported to each. Don't know about Edge or Internet Exploder (don't use them), but the rest handle bookmarks just fine.
One reason to use Mozilla is exactly to avoid the slurping Chrome and Edge do. Nobody really believe data will be truly anonymized - even if it was really possible. Moreover truly relevant suggestion would require to build a thoroughly user profile - and still it won't understand when I'm going to look for something different.
I'm really tired of all those startups the just promise more and better data analytics - it's just BS but they know they will find some gullible company that will buy them.
Really they don't get it do they?
We don't need a clone of Chrome / Google.
I even turn off all search / guessing etc in URL box and use search without guess ahead.
I also use 52 ESR, Classic Theme Restorer, a user agent switcher (because of idiot sites that hide downloads based on your OS) and NoScript.
Mozilla are neither developing what people think they want, nor what would be useful.
That's what Mozilla tries to find out.
To date, FF has some 24% of marketshare in Germany, whereas worldwide it's about 12%.
Chrome at 32% (de) compared to 60% (ww).
How to fix?
P**s off German users, picky about privacy and things that get installed automatically behind the scenes, let's see if we manage to further decrease marketshare.
Dropped FF, working on Opera right now, a slim and (in comparison) amazingly fast browser.
You are picky about privacy yet happy to use the now Chinese Opera browser?
Beijing will have already slurped all your data by the time you react in panic to my comment and uninstall that piece of “malware”...not an accusation of Opera, just my personal opinion that someone may have done to it as they did to CCleaner, or worse.
Man, if you're worried about China, then nothing electronic is safe anymore. Our potential attack surface from them is huge.
OTOH, if you're not in a position sensitive to industrial espionage, there's an argument to be made that at least data China gathers is unlikely to be given to the NSA. (Though they could conceivably intercept it in transit, I supppose.)
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