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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?"
I can block images from a certian server, but not flash ads^H^H^H elements from sepecific servers.
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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.
Opera and proxomitron. It allows me to filter out flash like everyone's complaining about, and you can set rules for just about everything sent and recieved. Very nice.
For complete privacy you can get your hard drvie reformatted with the click of a link.
However it would be nice to have logging of which cookies are actually used during a browsing session so you can keep track of who's tracking you. Maybe this is possible and/or exists in other browsers?
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Opera! It's got a wide array of privacy features. You can not only turn off cookies, images, GIF animation, and all that, but you can do it on the fly by pressing the F12 key. Also, you can choose not to send reffer information along to the site, if you don't want them to know where you came from. One more thing, you can choose to identify as Opera, MSIE, and from 3 different versions of Mozilla. And that's just in the 6.x version, the 7 beta is now availible for download from opera.com!
I use Mozilla on all platforms I'm running but combine it with bannerfilter on squid. Mozilla doesn't support regexps yet for picture-blocking but is host-based until they fix bug 78104. Disk cache is switched on though as I'm the only user on my system so I don't see this as a possible security problem.
Cookies are selectively permitted and pop-ups are blocked.
Security is imho the biggest reason to use Mozilla in stead of IE.
I'd like the ability to block images from a site without actually visiting the site.
Right now with Mozilla, if I want to block images from goats.cx (or whatever), I need to visit the site, view the disgusting image, right click, and select "Block images from this site" (or go to Tools: Image Manager: Block images from this site).
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I use this with both IE and Mozilla. I have Mozilla ask before accepting cookies, so I've added a bunch of usage tracking sites to my proxy script.
You can find a sample of how to do this at a friend's site: no-ads
iCab, available only for the Mac, is one of the best browsers I have seen as far as privacy goes.
It can filter images based on the server, link, size, or anything else.
It can filter cookies based on the server, duration, or anything else.
it can filter JavaScript (InScript) based on server, action, or anything else.
One of the best features: You can set it to only use "Referer" from within the same domain. So if I link to a Sony.com page from Slashdot, Sony has no idea how I got to the page. But Sony can track how I navigate their site (You can also set iCab to never send referer:)
There are more features than I could ever list here. Suffice to say it is very powerful and very configurable. Anyone using MacOS deserves to look at it.
it is still missing a few things, and it is compliant to a fault at times (with regards to page layout), but I use it for 99.5% of my browsing without and problems.
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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.
Mozilla does support regexp-based filtering through Automatic Proxy Configuration. See http://www.schooner.com/~loverso/no-ads/ for information on how to do this. (It's not what the feature was designed for, but it works perfectly.)
I use Privoxy (get if from SourceForge).
It's a filtering HTTP proxy, incredibly configurable, and of course browser and platform independant. The "out of the box" config also does a really good job (IMHO) of filtering without being too intrusive.
Features include:
Filtering images, flash and java applets
Cookie management including transforming permanent cookies to session based cookies.
Pop-up window killing
Filtering of any URL pattern with regular expressions
.... plus much more. Really, to much to list. Try it.
For the record, I use Netscape 7 with all the features that I can.
-BrentI find that privoxy works better for me than the mechanisms built in to any browser. It's based on the old junkbusters codebase with many more features. It's available for both windows and very nearly any form of UNIX (or UNIX-like) OS you might reasonably use to browse the net. (Of course, I have it set to allow ads for slashdot :-)) In combination with phoenix's popup blocking (which takes care of SSL sites such as hushmail that privoxy can't) I find that it gives me near-perfect control over my browsing experience.
That said, if I really suspect that a particular site may be malicious, as opposed to simply obnoxious, I look it over in lynx first.
.sig: file not found
The way I prevent flash ads is by adding a line to my /etc/hosts file that looks like this:
192.168.0.3 ad.doubleclick.net
This makes my browser look for the flash file (or any other ad.doubleclick.net url) on my own box, thereby breaking the the ad and preventing the cookies.
--I second the nomination of the iCab browser as being just "good" overall. Wicked fast (in my purely anecdotal tests the fastest GUI browser I have ever used), small download, installs easily, updates easily, basically "just works" really well, plus all the features. Cookie control is outstanding and there are a lot more speedy menu choices available directly from the browser rather than opening a preferences dialog window separately, images load and not load, select just one image on a page, etc.. I've only used it on Mac classic, but tell ya what, it allowed me to listen to mp3 streaming audio plus browsing when nothing else would on my semi ancient 1400 powerbook, and runs on a real old one almost as well, an old 280c I setup for my girlfriend, that only has a moto 68k processor in it at I *think* 25 mghz.. I actually wish that it was ported to linux as well, I'd use it if it was the same functionality it has in mac over, say, mozilla.
I would like, for example, to allow only slashdot.org and nytimes.com to set persistant cookies. I can do this in explorer by setting it to block all cookies, then putting certain sites in my 'trusted sites' list, but I don't think mozilla works that way.
What if you could have automatic ad filtering work just like spam filtering using the Bayesian classification technique?
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?
Really its only a few websites which do the majority of the ads, so not that many sites actually need to be blocked. Anything that makes it through my HOSTS file is usualy on a site that I enjoy (ie. Slashdot) and so I'm not bothered by the ads. One drawback could be that you see an annoying message where the image is supposed to be, however there is software to change that as well.
The hosts file I use can be found here: Kazaa Lite Webpage, you'll have to click on the "supertrick" button on the left, since I'm too lazy to figure how to directly link.
telnet www.microsoft.com 80
GET / HTTP/1.0
I disagree. If you're using a browser with a proxy, you're going through two separate layers of code that are designed to process HTTP requests. Now perhaps in a perfect world based on the Unix philosophy of combining small tools, the browser would actually be several separate applications glued together: HTML renderer, Cookie manager, URL fetcher, etc.
But I don't want to have two separate HTTP layers. I've used Junkbuster, and it's slow, and results in different behaviours (particularly in cases of servers not responding).
We already have a URL-fetching layer in the browser. Let's extend it to have plugins that let you control what it does. You can already do this with automatic proxy configuration to decide where (if at all) to fetch a given URL based on a JavaScript function. The only thing you can do with a real proxy that isn't yet available through a plugin is modification of retreived content. You can block the ads, but you can't eliminate the HTML that chews up a big block of space for the ad.
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.
Maybe I am being naive, but...
How is the process of blocking Ads protecting my privacy?
Good luck. Please chip in if you can think of anything I haven't--this is pretty off-the-cuff.
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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.)
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Even better, you can override the height and width elements so that the ads really go away completely.
What I'm trying to figure out is a way to have my stylesheet recognize any image of a given standard banner size (I can do that), and then tell the browser to use the actual size of the image instead of whatever the HTML has encoded for it. Then when my ad blocker substitutes a 1x1 transparent gif, I won't even see a big block of space. I'm new to style sheets (as of reading your post and Googling the web a bit); can I do this?
I figured it out. My ~/.mozilla/default/*/chrome/userContent.css file not includes:
w idth="234"], *[height="60px"][width="234px"],[ width="120"], *[height="600px"][width="120px"],] [width="160"], *[height="600px"][width="160px"],] [width="240"], *[height="120px"][width="240px"],] [width="180"], *[height="150px"][width="180px"],] [width="250"], *[height="300px"][width="250px"],] [width="280"], *[height="336px"][width="280px"],] [width="240"], *[height="400px"][width="240px"],] [width="250"], *[height="250px"][width="250px"],[ width="728"], *[height="90px"][width="728px"],[ width="336"]
*[height="60"][width="468"], *[height="60px"][width="468px"],
*[height="60"][
*[height="600"]
*[height="600"
*[height="120"
*[height="150"
*[height="300"
*[height="336"
*[height="400"
*[height="250"
*[height="90"]
*[height="280"]
{ width: auto !important; height: auto !important; }
Those are based on a list of standard ad sizes I found somewhere, and I'm adding to it based on the blank spaces I run across. The great thing about this is that if I happen to find a page that uses that size of image for something that isn't blocked, I still see it just like normal, but if it is blocked (by my auto-proxy script) and substituted by a 1x1 transparent gif, that's all the space the ad takes up.
Now all I need to do is replace my 1x1 transparent gif with a 0x0 gif or jpeg. Is such an image allowed by the specs?
I didn't think you could do this before I tested it, but yes. Use "width: auto!important; height: auto!important" in your userContent.css stylesheet. This will (according to my pitifully simple test) override the attributes in the tag and also override Javascript resizing of the image.
Mozilla also has attributes called "naturalHeight" and "naturalWidth" for images, but they're only available from Javascript AFAICT.
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
I have a feeling you'd probably have to go hacking with a hex editor and a copy of the image format specification to get a 0x0 gif or jpg, and it might just crash your browser. :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
Opera wins the privacy contest for me, hands-down, with the "Delete Private Data" option. It's right there in the "File" menu. You get a dialog box asking what you want to delete:
* Cookies (temporary or all)
* Cache (password-protected pages or all)
* History (visited pages, typed-in addresses, visited links, transferred files)
* Clear email passwords (if you use the built-in email)
Of all of these, I think I most like the ability to quickly clear typed-in addresses. I share the computer with the kids, and the last thing I want is for them to type the letter "g" and have "goatse.cx" pop up!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.