Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox

An anonymous reader writes: Firefox's privacy mode stops your computer from keeping track of where you've browsed, but it doesn't do anything about external tracking. A new feature just rolled out to the Developer Edition and the Aurora channel now actively tries to block online services from tracking you. "Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you're sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide." The feature uses a blocklist maintained by Disconnect.me to stop you from navigating to sites known to log your personal data.

Comments

Is it just me...

[JMJimmy]

or does this seem like an ass backwards way of "protecting" privacy?

Start with "Normal Mode"

[SeaFox]

"Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you're sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide."

I'd say people want more control over their privacy even when they aren't going full-tilt in Private Browser Mode.
You know what a contributing factor is in loss of privacy? A browser that has web services and features built-in that rely on third-party companies.

Desperation due to FF's collapsing marketshare?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, panic has started to set in at Mozilla. They're starting to see that Firefox's marketshare has fallen through the floor.

We're talking about a browser that once had over 30% of the market reduced down to around 9% lately. Firefox for Android has been an abject failure at around 0.15% of the market. There's no presence on iOS. Firefox OS is totally irrelevant.

Chrome for Android alone has about twice as many users as all versions of Firefox have! iOS Safari has about the same number of users that Firefox does. IE 11 alone has almost as many users, and that's even after IE has suffered a similar freefall from its once lofty heights. Firefox's numbers are even approaching those of Opera Mini!

Mozilla only has any relevance today because of Firefox. We see very little use of Mozilla's other offerings. Thunderbird saw some use, until Mozilla essentially put it on life support. Firefox OS has been a complete failure. Bugzilla is seen as old and outdated. Servo is embryonic, and unusable. Rust was infected by Ruby hypesters fleeing the sinking Ruby on Rails ship, and took forever to get even a mediocre 1.0 release out.

Although Mozilla hasn't seemed too willing to acknowledge the massive problem facing Firefox, maybe it's finally starting to sink in. Maybe they've finally realized that when a browser has 30% of the market, then 25%, then 20%, then 15%, then 12%, and now only 9%, something is wrong.

When it gets to the point that almost nobody is using Firefox, Mozilla will lose what little influence they have left. The only reason that they have any influence today is because of their past success with Firefox, but that was an increasingly long time ago. Will Yahoo keep throwing money at Mozilla when Firefox only has 1% or less of the market? It's doubtful!

Maybe they're starting to realize the disaster that awaits them, as an organization. I think we're starting to see them panic. Instead of listening to their users, they're throwing shit against the wall in a frenzy, trying to see what sticks. That's what the ads in Firefox have been about. That's what Pocket has been about. That's what Hello has been about. That's what junk like this is about. It's just one knee-jerk reaction after another, as it becomes clearer and clearer that the future of Firefox and Mozilla is looking bleaker and bleaker.

I wanted to see Mozilla succeed. They used to be a very respected organization, up there with the FSF and the Apache project. Yet they've done so much to drive away so many of Firefox's users. Their smugness has become their undoing, throwing them into the self-destructive spiral we see now. The worst part is that none of this was necessary! If only they had listened to Firefox's users, rather than forcing one shitty thing after another upon these users, then Mozilla wouldn't be in such a bad position today. Firefox would still be seen as an innovative, powerful browser that people want to use, rather than the mockery and the awful Chrome imitation that it has become today. It didn't have to be like this!

Re:Desperation due to FF's collapsing marketshare?

[narcc]

It lost a lot of share to Chrome because,well, Chrome was better. Rather than standing still, FireFox has been improving steadily for years, I'd recommend it over Chrome today.

Then you have the noisy idiots. That's mostly Slashdot, but the stupidity tends to spread like spilled ink. Privacy hawks bitch and moan over things that often aren't even true, then recommend the worst browser on the market in terms of privacy (see above). Take a look at the prefetch flap-up further down the front page, the reality is so far away from the nonsense that dominates that thread it boarders on the absurd. More commonly, you'll hear about the mysterious memory leak issues (many of which simply didn't exist) from a bygone era. Times have changed, kids, get with it.

The weirdest of all, naturally, is the bitching and moaning over Australis. So upset these yahoos are over the change that they vow to switch to Chrome. No, I'm not kidding. I'll bet a nickle you'll find one in this thread.

I've been recommending FF for XP users over Chrome for a while because it was undeniably better on those older machines. I've been recommending it now because it's better everywhere else now as well. (Cue the "no it's not because of minor feature x" comments.) That it's also better for philosophical reasons is a nice bonus.

Chrome gained market share because people like you and I recommend it over the alternatives. We recommended it because it was, hands-down, the best browser on the market. Times have changed. Rather than bitching and moaning about how it's not perfect, pushing people away from such an incredibly important product, we should instead promote it as the better browser. FF will regain market share the same way it lost it.

(There are other factors that may help that shift along. Kids have already started to discover that a lot of the games they play simply won't work on Chrome after they dropped NPAPI support. I've already noticed a shift to FF among that demographic in my tiny corner of the world.)

I switched back to FF about a year ago when they updated the UI. I stayed with it because it performed noticeably better than Chrome. Why wouldn't I recommend it over the privacy nightmare that is Chrome?

Re:Ain't Gonna Happen

[Anonymous Coward]

Spied on faster, get Chrome.