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Browsers Which Protect Your Privacy?
valkraider asks: "Browsers are getting better at protecting user's privacy. Mozilla has pretty good cookie preferences. Many browsers like OmniWeb for Mac OS X will block images from sites based on wildcard expressions (like *ad*). Most browsers have settings to delete cookies and cache and such at the end of each session. Even IE for windows (not Mac) will allow you to 'import' a privacy file and control many things pretty tightly. Currently on PCs I use Mozilla with no disk cache, no persistent cookies, no third party images,and many blocked image sites. I can do almost the same with Chimera on Mac OS X. What are people's favorite browsers for protecting your privacy?" Which browsers provide the best balance between functionality and privacy? What privacy features would you like to see, that are missing from those currently available?"
So many sites are using flash now instead of normal images that the image blocking, while very nice, is becoming less useful. It'd be nice to be able to enforce the same controls on flash content (and other forms of content delivery) as normal images.
Konq has a feature that I really enjoy:
:). They're erased when you close your browser, thus rendering them incapable of tracking your long term web surfing. Being able to let all of these through means a lot of 'allow this cookie?' dialogs I don't need to see.
'Automatically accept session cookies'
Session cookies are generally those that provide application persistency, applications that often won't work without them - even ones I've written myself
Also, konq has (Mozilla too, I believe) a 'smart' popup window policy, showing only windows that you yourself 'request' by clicking a link etc. Automated popups magically just don't appear.
Blocking regular ads on pages is an interesting feature in Mozilla, which I'm glad doesn't exist in konqueror or most other browsers - I can't see how this could be good for the user in the long run.
sig sig sputnik
Web surfers might want a web browser which offers them more control of their surfing experience (privacy enhancements, for example), but web site purveyors want to see features which take control away from the surfer (such as unclosable pop-under windows).
The result of the collision of those two trends is that browsers (such as opera) which offer ad-blocking and privacy enhancing features are going to be discriminated against as opposed to browsers (such as IE) which offer web content providers a rich set of features. And the more empowering (to the user) the browser is, the more quickly web sites will move to degrade support for that browser.
Its' a shame, but phenomenon like this are going to kill the Internet as we know it, or reduce it to something nobody wants to waste their time on (like broadcast television.)
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
You can do this with a cookperm.txt file.
Ad Blocking with Mozilla has some good info. You can also use this in Chimera to some extent. For more info Google it.
Use a proxy to filter out what you don't want. Use the browser to render the pages.
/. story today on IE's 'ability' to run arbitray code from a supposedly 'local' page).
The proxy'll work with any browser that allows you to set a proxy, so that you can set up a rule set that doesn't change when/if you change browsers (i.e., in cases where the site only supports, e.g., IE).
More importantly, the proxy (if it supports regexed grepping) can be set up to remove or alter any arbitrary HTML -- something most browsers aren't set up to do. And it provides a additional layer of defense when the browser is buggy (see the earlier
I use Proxomitron under Windows. It does arbitray regex, so I can remove ads, flash, abitrary javascript, etc. I can also add or change elements (showing hidden fields is useful in debugging). And I suspect I'll be able to come up with a filter for the IE bug I mentioned above.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I really don't get why this is not implemented. it seems to me that form submissions are of much more interest to the user than plain http gets.
there is a bug for this feature filed for mozilla, and I even tried implementing it. but there is little interest, which amazes me.
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
News flash: not all ads come from doubleclick. Not even a majority do.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
Maybe I am being naive, but...
How is the process of blocking Ads protecting my privacy?
Mozilla needs configurable zones.
Right now you can set privacy properties based on *content*. But it is much much more likely that you will want to set them based on *site*, not *content*. Mozilla needs to take a page from IE, and reorganize its settings so that all content settings belong to a zone, which maps to a set of URLs (set of regular expressions, etc.). In IE there is a fixed number of zones, and hence, only a fixed number of security settings/levels. There is no reason that in Mozilla this could not be expanded to arbitrary zones. It is really burdensome to have to configure things on a content-by-content basis, when it is really the *site* for which you want to configure settings.
Here is what I would do:
default zone: most security risks are disabled...not all though, because many common sites would just be broken (javascript, etc.)
trusted zone: all security settings are open (e.g., my own local network, my office network, etc.)
untrusted zone: goatse.cx, etc. Any sites which I absolutely want EVERYTHING disabled on. In reality I haven't found much to stick in here because my default settings are pretty strict.
somewhat-trusted sites: some sites I "sorta" trust...in that I use them daily and they need a lower level of security than default sites, yet, I still don't want everything on (e.g. nytimes.com)
IE has no notion of the latter because it only has fixed zones. In Mozilla there could be an arbitrary number of zones/setting configurations (maybe some sites you want ONLY flash enabled and nothing else? maybe some javascript development sites you want ONLY javascript enabled? etc.)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?