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Et Tu, Mozilla? Firefox 3 To Get Privacy Mode
CWmike writes "Mozilla will respond to Google's Chrome and Microsoft's IE8 with its own private-browsing, or 'porn' mode in Firefox, according to notes posted on its Web site, and is on track to deliver one in 3.1, the version that will likely go beta next month."
What's wrong with a little realism? Viewing porn is one of the major uses of a web browser, thus such a facility is practically a no-brainer.
Lets face it. Pornography has been around since the dawn of the internet and in all that time not one browser, newsreader or email client ever offered a "privacy mode" until recently. We're talking since BBS days here. Yes there are some people who would like to spin, or frame, these features as "porn mode". But this is a fairly transparent attempt to discredit what is an important, appropriate and yes disruptive new innovation.
And what has spurred this innovation? What necessity has been the mother of this invention? Porn? No. Thing far more unsettling than that. Phishers, fraudsters, malware have all played their part. People need more protection nowadays. But most of the reasons for privacy features can be summed up in one word.
Marketers.
Modern marketers are utterly relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever. They are are with enormous databases, and the desire to fill them with as much data as they can lay their hands on. Tracking users and their habits online, and assaulting them with advertisements based on that data has become an industry in itself. Every social networking website, every online newspaper, every site that has any ability to track its users whatsoever is piping that data straight to an eager marketing department which presumably has some method concocted to throw ads back at users who would rather be left alone.
This is international information collection on an unprecedented scale in human history. To be sure, as of now this is only a practice of private enterprise, the current databases are disorganized and incompatible. But this is a new industry, essentially only a decade or so old. What will happen when its methods, theories and processes standardize? How dangerous will those databases be then?
Google is not blameless in this either. Remember that the company makes its money not on searches, but on advertisements that it offers on its search pages and on other sites. That company is tracking probably the majority of web user by now, and any site that you go to that is affiliated with Google (this includes Slashdot), dutifully makes sure that your presence their and what you are doing is made known to Seattle, so that they may better know your habits. You think they'll just sit on all that juicy marketing data till the end of time and forever "Do No Evil"? Get real. They are a private company and will do whatever they like as long as it is legal. Watch it happen.
So go ahead, call it a "porn" feature, but the reality is that those browsing for porn will probably not even bother to turn it on. It will only be used by those who understand just how dangerous so much personal data in private hands can be.
Make no mistake, this is a disruptive technology. Marketers will not like it. Webmasters will not like it. Google will not like it. So expect substantial mudslinging surrounding this issue in the months to come.
May the Maths Be with you!
Pr0n mode can kill free pr0n in theory.
Pretty much every single free porn site on the Internet makes money via affiliate programs. They offer free content in an attempt to sell you a membership to the pay site that the content comes from. The way the affiliate clicks are tracked is via cookies. If every web browser has an easy way to toggle cookie-saving while browsing porn then free porn sites could end up losing a ton of money. They'll go under if such browsing practices become the norm and affiliate programs can't figure out a better way to track than cookies. And avoiding tracking is one of the obvious purposes here.
So a tip to surfers. If you have absolutely no intention of purchasing a pay-site membership ever then leave the cookies off and don't sweat it. But if you purchase porn at all then you're not doing your favourite free site(s) any service by browsing with cookies off.
You have a login on your computer right? So that other people can't see your files? That means they cannot see your browsing history either. The only reason for a 'stealth mode' is to keep the browsing history secret from *yourself*, so it doesn't helpfully autosuggest embarrassing sites when you start typing in the awesome bar.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Specifically, the mode would:
* Discard all cookies acquired during the private session.
* Not record sites visited to the browser's history.
* Not autofill passwords, and not prompt the user to save passwords.
* Remove all downloads done during the session from the browser's download manager.
These are good web surfing practices to begin with. These seem more like bug fixes to me. Why not make them the default? Why would I ever want to browse without these safeguards?
Simply a case of competition driving another cycle of improvement. Those people who like to claim there's no reason for open source developers to improve and innovate often forget that your basic human being is a competitive critter at heart.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
What I would personally like is to be able to add certain sites to a password-protected "privacy list", so that visits to those sites would be stealthed, while visits to other sites would not. I don't want to have to start a special private session, which seems like a pretty lame way to do it. Mozilla should have looked at how to improve this feature by adding something like that, for example. Unfortunately it looks like Mozilla are just implementing the same thing as IE and Chrome, instead of looking to improve on it.
Let me be sure I've got this. Your proposal on how to keep from generating lists of sites you don't want people to know you visit, is to generate a list of sites you don't want people to know you visit.
Brilliant!
By default I put my snail mail in envelopes (keep my correspondence private), by default I put on clothes (keep my privates... private), and by default I expect the police are not searching my house or tapping my phone (4th Amendment privacy).
That's not really a good analogy. It's not like your browser broadcasts its history. It's just there by default to anyone using your computer. Take your wife (or husband) for example. Just as she, by default, at your computer and logged in, has access to your history, she also has access to what snail mail you get and, with luck, those privates you mentioned.
~Warning!~ The above is encrypted using rot676!
-1, stupid comparisons
A list of "private" sites is a pretty convenient way for somebody to figure out what sites you're going to that you don't want people to know about.
The whole point of this is to *not* leave a trail.
The point of the privacy option is it makes it much easier to keep useful things like cookes and history for your day to day browsing while also allowing you to surf anonymously for your "private sites".
With IE8 having the functionality to log keystrokes and send those back home the level of privacy is debatable.
From the IE8 Privacy statement, that almost no one will go though the trouble of reading:
"When Suggested Sites is turned on, the addresses of websites you visit are sent to Microsoft, together with some standard information from your computer such as IP address, browser type, regional and language settings,"
One of these things, is not like the other.
Ah, someone in the same sorry state of affairs got mod points. Still, doesn't change that it's a poor way of living. Think about it.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
"People having to hide pleasures from their wifes/SOs makes me sad (Y_Y)"
You sound like somebody without wife/SO
The trouble with not allowing cookies in the current addons, Stealther for example, is that it blocks the cookies entirely, rather than simply sandboxing them. So reddit or many other sites, for example, keeps asking if you are over 18 and won't allow you past until you allow it to set a cookie. With a sandboxed approach, the site can set the cookie to its hearts content and you, the user, know that the sandbox will be wiped clean when you close the browser/tab.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
You sound like somebody without wife/SO
You sound like someone with limited life experience.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Back in the days of Firefox 2, you could surf with no worries. All you had to do was avoid typing the porn site into the address bar, and you left no noticeable traces. This meant that bookmarks and links (think search results) left virtually no traces.
If you screwed-up, you could easily erase your browsing history. If you were really paranoid, you could turn off cookies while you browsed as well.
Then, along came Firefox 3 with the Awfulbar(TM). Suddenly, your entire web access history plus bookmarks were laid bare, and suddenly there was a need for a privacy mode. I've personally managed to get around the whole annoyance by using "show only typed" with Oldbar (behaves like Firefox 2), but for most general users this is far too complicated.
Of course, they could just make us all entirely happy by removing the Awfulbar(TM), but I'm not expecting miracles.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Average Joe doesn't even know what flash cookies are, let alone how to turn them off, but that doesn't matter because Average Jane doesn't know what they are either or where to look for them.
Average Joe's big worry is that Average Jane will go to check her emails and as she types the hot in hotmail, hot-teen-pussy.com comes up in the drop-down box, or worse, hot-twinks.com
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?