Mozilla Adds Do-Not-Track Feature To Firefox 4 Pre-Beta Builds

An anonymous reader writes "Mozilla cranked out a new version of Firefox 4 (Beta 11-pre) that includes the proposed do-not-track feature. Both the nightly builds and latest trunk builds integrate the do-not-track feature. You could accuse Mozilla of wasting time with Firefox 4 beta-testing, but this feature certainly has surfaced fast."

Comments

Re:It's great

[Esospopenon]

It's the great chicken and egg dilemma. Why would anyone use it if there are no browsers that supports it?

So i guess the privacy browsing feature

[Stan92057]

So i guess the privacy browsing feature doesn't work as well?? or at all?

Re:So i guess the privacy browsing feature

[Sockatume]

They do different things. Privacy browsing gives you a new, clean session that's trashed (with temp files, cookies, etc.) when you exit. Do-not-track tells sites they should not be tracking your activity, without affecting your session's permanence. In some situations you'd want neither, either, or both.

Re:So i guess the privacy browsing feature

[Rhaban]

Firefox's private browsing is the worst among the main browsers. In opera you can open a private tab alongside your other tabs, chrome opens a private window, but firefox is the only one to close all your current tabs when you want private browsing.

Re:So i guess the privacy browsing feature

[anilg]

Chrome privacy window is of a different color. When you regularly use it, you immediately know when you're in privacy mode by the color. It's intuitive, and in no way confusing when you're used to it.

Re:It's great

[Richard_at_work]

Every browser in the world can support it, it means nothing if the websites do not honour it - and what reason do they have to honour it?

Do I have this right?

[codeButcher]

Is this a header that nicely asks advertisers not to track you? And if they choose to ignore it??

Re:Do I have this right?

[Seumas]

Correct. You can use the "opt-out" feature, but it only works if the advertiser also "opts-in". In other words, this is completely fucking useless. It's like having a car that is crash-proof, as long as nobody crashes into you. (Because this is slashdot and this post would be useless without a car analogy).

Re:Do I have this right?

[Seumas]

That'll be great. For Americans in America visiting American websites hosted in America and advertising for American advertisers in America.

Re:Do I have this right?

[Sockatume]

It's like robots.txt*. People are entitled to ignore it, but they will reap the consequences if they do. Whether adoption of this flag is as heroic will say a lot about the maturity of the web.

*Appropriate, really. Used to be you'd make a site and decide how much you wanted to share with spiders using robots.txt. Now you make a Facebook profile and decide how much you want to share with advertisers similarly.

Firefox Advertising?

[commodore6502]

Whenever there's a Beta release (11 times so far) we get a post. And NOW we have a post about a release that not even a full beta, but just a pre-build.

But we don't ever get updates when Mozilla Seamonkey has a release (upto beta 3 now), or Chrome, or Safari, or Opera. Yes Firefox is my favorite browser (because of the addons), but can we at least have some balance? Coverage of other browsers would be good too.

Re:Firefox Advertising?

[commodore64_love]

>>>their usage share is so low they can't influence much on their own.
>>>

And yet everyone keeps copying Opera:
- the "paste and go" function in the title bar
- the speeddial function that displays 6-12 icons for websites
- the online "cloud" storage of bookmarks so they can be accessed from anywhere
- spellcheck
- instant display of half-loaded pages
- Turbo for slow dialup lines
- and of course the biggest one: Tabbed browsing.

Plus other features I've forgotten, but originated with Opera originally and others copied. It appears this browser has had a LOT of influence.

Re:It's great

[commodore6502]

>>>Having a browser with a feature that no one else uses!

When Netscape first introduced the concept of Inline Pictures, or Frames, or Blink, nobody had ever used them before either. But the web quickly adapted.

(Still not sure why blink was deprecated. How am I supposed to design a website header that mimics Neon signs?)

Re:Not convincing until they solved the memory lea

[Shikaku]

https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/configuration-mania-4420/

Install this addon.

Click Edit for Mac/Linux or Tools for Windows, Configuration Mania, which should be under preferences.

Make sure Browser is highlighted on the top row, if not click it. Click Browser Cache on the Left Column. Press Disabled under Max Number of Pages Stored in Memory.

It keeps closed pages all in RAM, and decides based on your total RAM how much it will save. There are almost no leaks, just dumb decisions (developers) and judgments (users).

Re:Beta

[icebraining]

This is a checkbox which adds a single static header to each request, it's too simple to delay FF4 in any way.

Re:It's great

[bunratty]

The more important point is that anyone who writes a web page can use inline pictures, frames, and blink just by editing their page with a text editor. Do not track requires web server support. I think most web developers do not have access to the configuration of the web server, and even if they do have access, they generally don't know how to configure it properly.

Re:It's great

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

The proposed FTC regulation

Re:Beta

[rudy_wayne]

This is a checkbox which adds a single static header to each request, it's too simple to delay FF4 in any way.

From TFA:
"Currently, the feature shows up in the “Advanced” panel within Firefox Preferences. It pains me that it’s not under the “Privacy” panel, yet. This reflects our desire for speed in getting the feature into Firefox, as updating the “Privacy” UI and content will require additional engineering bandwidth. We’ll have more to say on this once we move the new feature into upcoming beta releases."

Translation: Even though we are already at Beta 11 and should be focused solely on fixing bugs for a final release, we are in a big hurry to cram in a new feature, of questionable value, and can't be arsed to implement it correctly because it would take too much "engineering bandwidth". (what the fuck is engineering bandwidth and who talks like that?)

Firefox and their "security theater"

[ugen]

On the one hand, Mozilla/Firefox has been taking control of cookies away from "regular users" - yes, it's all still there, but it is no longer obviously exposed, and instead most users would never even know what hides behind "Firefox will remember history" one-liner in a drop box.

So now, after cannibalizing the real control of privacy - one that rests with a user, they are trying to come up with an *http header* that is no more than a plea on part of a client to the server - "please don't track me". What are the chances anyone would give a damn (unless this is written into a *world wide* law with severe penalties?).

Sorry, this misses the mark completely. If you want to make sure users are not being tracked, restore control of information sites can store, make it *easier* and *more obvious* to users when they are being tracked, cooperate with or build into your browser functionality of "cookie jar", "ghostery", "adblock" and other click/cookie/link/image tracking control plugins. In short - do real work, rather than sticking a feel-good, do-nothing header which will achieve nothing.

Give me a version that doesn't crash

[bluefoxlucid]

Okay, my screen just turned black. Every v4 pre since like b2 has been corrupting its own memory, slowly dying, then outright crashing. The crash reporter has submitted 4 or 5 reports after crashes; it usually fails.

Re:Not convincing until they solved the memory lea

[Shikaku]

Have you actually used Firefox 4 on a Mac? The usual excuses are simply invalid - you open FF4b10 with Google as home page with barely anything on screen - 230MB is now gone! Safari opening Apple's oh-so-blingy home page is only using 100MB. "Max Number of Pages Stored in Memory" simply doesn't apply.

This "this is not technically a memory leak" thing is irrelevant when user experience is concerned.

This next statement direct answer to both your statements.
Webkit (Chrome and Safari) and Gecko (Firefox) work very differently. Firefox has sane disk cache limits (the default is 75MB), but instead opts to store much more in memory for the sake of speed.

There is no setting for Chrome nor Safari to change the disk cache, and in Chrome only a command line setting will change it. I've seen it balloon to 1GB.

So you see, for the sake of speed, something has to give. Firefox chose the route of RAM, probably following the philosophy that Linux users have that unused RAM is wasted RAM (hence Linux OS having the RAM cache full of files and regular users freak out. Since you are on a Mac, try running free in the command line and see your cache usage). Webkit I'm not sure why they do what they do, but considering the disk is currently much faster than any non-LAN network, it opts to use the disk.

So you see, there's very good reasons why these behaviors occur, and both have obvious advantages and disadvantages, all in the name of speed.

I'm babbling, I should get back to work now.