Hacker News Reader

Perfect is the enemy of good. Firefox is pushing the Overton window in the right direction, which is good enough for me. Some of your complaints are legitimate but that doesn't mean Firefox isn't the best option for most people right now.

Certainly, I am using firefox as well right now, but this does not mean that we should give up in our objective to privacy and just trust mozilla.

If your main concern is privacy, Firefox is not the best browser for most people right now:

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/Doug.Leith/pubs/browser_privacy.pdf

Brave's integrated ponzi scheme (magic Brave dollars) and fundamental dependency on Google's Chromium make it a no-go for me.

>Brave's integrated ponzi scheme (magic Brave dollars)

"Ponzi" and "magic" are not descriptors one would use if discussing this [objectively].

Fortunately, BAT is opt in, and you can get all of the superior privacy benefits of Brave without BAT playing any role in your browser experience.

I appreciate your point about BAT being opt-in. Maybe the language is a bit inflammatory for HN standards, but BAT has always seemed crummy to me.

And Chrome tracks individual users by Chrome installation ID. It's sent to certain Google domains like Doubleclick [1]. All browsers are tracking us. It has to do with when, where, and what they do with it.

We're not dealing with a perfect world. Some of this has to do with intents and privacy protections outside of technology (i.e., policy). At least that's Mozilla's stance. For example, the analytics Mozilla collects on Firefox cannot be legally used by the analytics service for other things.

We need to be careful to not let perfect be the enemy of good in the way we praise the the _direction_ we want to go.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22236106

Note, IANAL.

Correct me if I am wrong but aren't they including built-in tracker blocking with a 'strict' list that can be chosen, plus they are working on site-level isolation that is behind a config flag for now (1st party isolation) and as far as I know, they're the only browser that has multiple anti-fingerprinting measures that can be toggled by the resistFingerprinting config flag? If they default disabled web fonts, geolocation etc., they'd lose whatever little market share they have as those have become important web tech already. You can still disable all of them either by means of about:config toggles or through simple extensions like uMatrix. Not sure if Chrome even allows disabling any/all of them.

> If they default disabled web fonts, geolocation etc., they'd lose whatever little market share they have as those have become important web tech already.

I doubt people would even notice the font side of things.

They'd notice. Maybe they wouldn't notice that they notice, but they'd get a general feel that things look worse.

Agreed. I used panopticlick and it showed me that web fonts were one of the biggest discriminators. I disabled them and tested on a sample of normal end user type Web sites. The web got real ugly looking real fast. If Mozilla disabled web fonts by default, normal end users would draw the conclusion that Firefox couldn't properly render the web, and would flock back into the arms of Chrome.

They could ship web browser with all common web fonts to render them from disk without fetching. This would allow disabling of fetching of web fonts without breaking websites. Also could eliminate fonts as a fingerprinting vector altogether if system fonts were ignored as well.

That’s actually not a bad idea. Lots of sites do have custom fonts, so maybe it would be a good idea to still put some icon in the address bar when the site has web fonts that didn’t come with the browser.

What about fonts which are not licensed under an open source compatible license. What about fonts that are not "common" but are used by some popular Web site? Your request is doomed to failure. Like it or not, Web authors have been given the power by Web fonts to have total control of the fonts on their Web pages, and they ARE using that power. Any attempt by a low market share browser to change that fact is doomed to blow back on that browser.

I'm sure they can afford to buy rights to important non open source fonts or fund the design of similarly looking open source fonts to ship as aliases. There is no reason for the madness with fonts to continue.

Decentraleyes does exactly that (at least with scripts, I do not know if they do the same with webfonts and css files)

Even google news renders weird without custom fonts if I remember correctly. Lots of sites use font files as icon sets etc.

The only think that they would notice is when buttons break due to the lack of web fonts.

> aren't they including built-in tracker blocking with a 'strict' list that can be chosen

This is not in any way better than ublock origin. Anyone who knows to select the strict list also knows how to install an adblocker.

> If they default disabled web fonts, geolocation etc., they'd lose whatever little market share they have as those have become important web tech already

I am not saying that they should disable them by default, but they should at least make it easier for people who care about their privacy to disable them. (Although I do not think that any desktop user is going to miss geolocation)

In addition to that I am annoyed that they keep supporting such technologies that can be used for tracking in the working groups rather than push back on them.

> web fonts

I installed NoScript recently and was surprised to see so many sites linking to typekit or other centralized repos for JS related to rendering fonts. Why do sites using webfonts have JS dependencies? Is it something to do with licensing?

Between products like DTM and typekit, Adobe has been quietly positioning itself to be a tracking/advert power house.

The problem isn't analytics the problem is tracking. Brave is the perfect example. It may have no built in analytics but at the same time it is easier to track than Google Chrome due to fingerprinting. Do you care more about testing which features of a product are actually used (Firefox) or do you care about a company giving out your entire browsing history through a side.channel (Brave).

> The problem isn't analytics the problem is tracking

Both are an issue.

> it is easier to track than Google Chrome due to fingerprinting

> or do you care about a company giving out your entire browsing history through a side.channel (Brave).

I do not use Brave but [citation needed].

When I wanted to quickly add some analytics to my website to see if anyone's reading it and from where, I had a hard time with Google Analytics because neither Firefox nor Safari allowed me to check if it works. Had to open Chrome to ensure it does log viewers.

Pocket too

Indeed. Firefox is not the best browser if your main concern is privacy:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419284