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1 month ago…For now. Looks like they’re going to get rid of it too (which makes sense, because they copy Chromium’s codebase).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/extensions-chromium/developer-guide/manifest-v3
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Cake day: November 8th, 2023
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You’re 100% right about Brave being scummy.
And I hope my point didn’t come across as a defensd of Brave, but rather, “how is it that Mozilla is doing this thing in a worse way than a company that is infamously disreputable?”
I think that’s the point: Google has been shutting down Manifest V2 extensions one step at a time, and it’s been experimenting with anti-ad-block tech on YouTube with one user group at a time.
You haven’t heard about the Brave ads that let you slowly accumulate tokens that you can then use to tip creators or websites? I’m not saying it was a good plan, or an ethical plan, but it was… You know, something.
Unlike what Mozilla did, Brave didn’t enable this by default, but they heavily marketed it as a feature.
If Mozilla implemented some kind of tipping system, that could be interesting. Apparently, such a system already could exist under GNU Taler too.
Would you look at that, privacy preserving advertisement!
Let’s take it one step further and go really crazy with a/b testing
<a href="company_url/campaign1"><img src="funny_picture.gif"></a> <a href="company_url/campaign2"><img src="different_picture.gif"></a>
disingeneous to call it adding ads
Who called it adding
With all due respect, Mozilla is now (and, for a while, has been) an ad company. When an ad company tells you ads are necessary, you should not trust them. Plenty of lousy things have been entrenched as social norms, but it is the job of the entrenchers to justify their existence… Which Mozilla is definitely not doing here.
51·1 month agoUser-unique gets collected, and then the user-unique data sent to a remote server.
Only on the remote server will this data be aggregated, or so Mozilla says.
I think a big part of the problem is that they didn’t show anyone a notification or an onboarding dialog or whatever about this feature, when it got introduced.
Right. Not only didn’t they notify anybody, but they took to Reddit to defend the decision not to notify anybody:
we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.
Which is strange, because Mozilla has no problem with popups in general.
A for-profit that wrapped itself in a non-profit shell that is empty and just run by the for-profit?
If we take “unlimited unauthenticated API access shouldn’t be possible” for granted, I’m unfortunately not all that technically competent about what can be done next.
The first thing that comes to mind is treating website access and app access differently, maybe limiting app API access by default for people who haven’t logged in.
Or creating a separate bot API that’s rolled out across all servers at some point in the future… And I know federation could pose some serious chokepoints here so that’s where my speculation ends.
I have a few suggestions for development concerns off the top of my head:
- Scrub post metadata* after users request its deletion
- Auto-purge deleted content* rather than letting it sit behind a “deleted” flag (something Facebook got a ton of flak for doing)
- Auto-purge deleted media*
- Consider seriously limiting opening data wide for scraping, since the problem is non-consensual scraping, not payment for non-consensual scraping
* either immediately or, to prevent spam, after some time
…And attitudes like this towards privacy will keep Lemmy from progressing to a point where those issues will be fixed.
I have a fundamental problem with giant corporations scraping user data without user consent. That’s a system-level issue. It doesn’t become “good” just because they get to scrape without consent for free.
Lemmy has quite a few unfortunately invasive qualities of its own, including generally needing an email address from you (Reddit does not), having poor privacy and data retention practices, and generally being very messy with who gets to decide what happens with your data and how easily it can be scraped.
Sure, Reddit sells it… But Lemmy gives it to any web scraper for free.
To paraphrase Louis Rossman, he doesn’t need the fraction of a penny he’d get from you wasting your time, and if YouTube wants your money then they should earn it.
Live streams will stutter badly when a game is going on, something I have experienced in Firefox but not Chrome.
And of course Chromium has billions of dollars at its disposal while Mozilla can’t even accept donations from users for Firefox so it’s not exactly surprising that the browser with worse funding and management doesn’t run as well.
What’s the best browser to recommend to people who want to dump Brave but either can’t or won’t switch to Firefox, due to things like unoptimal behavior of sites like YouTube while playing games, for example?
The best I’ve come up with is Thorium, a de-Googled Chromium fork, optimized for speed.
You’ve got two options:
- Fight back with ad blockers. Tubular or ReVanced on Android, uBlock Origin on PCs.
- Pay up. (This is the unethical option.)
Acceptable Ads is bullshit on many levels:
uBlock Origin, or at least uBlock Origin Lite on Chromium-like browsers, are must-haves.
The best browser you can set up for a family member, IMO, is Firefox. Disable Telemetry (which should rid them of Mozilla’s own ad scheme too), install uBlock Origin, remind them to never call or trust any other tech support people who reach out to them, and maybe walk them through some scam baiting videos.
I’m still evaluating which Chrome-likes are best at actual ad blocking, and the landscape is grim.