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Mozilla Tests Improved Privacy Mode For Firefox

Posted by Soulskill on from the these-are-not-the-droids-you're-looking-for dept.

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.

2 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. Firefox only pays lip service to privacy by BringMyShuttle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can dig deep into your about:config settings and fix it there ((sorry - setting so obscure can't remember it! You might find it to turn it off but Grandmama won't)) and you are right!!! Firefox only pays lip service to privacy. And like their tieup with Adobe DRM https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-c..., their advertising page for "partners" http://adexchanger.com/ad-exch..., targeting you for advertising based on your browsing http://www.pcworld.com/article..., and now Disconnect.me, they're doing favors for businesses. Google was paying Firefox $300M a year http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/... before they pulled the plug and Firefox reached a deal with Yahoo, and they switched searches to Yahoo -- not because it was the better search engine, but because Yahoo was giving them cash http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

    Firefox has become a megacorporation. They are not for profit http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... so that money doesn't to shareholders but it goes SOMEWHERE like executive salaries and just like a megacorporation they care more about cutting deals with other businesses than they do the public because we are not their customers. They are!

    1. Re:Firefox only pays lip service to privacy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Mozilla's existence is completely dependent on other companies, whose existence is completely dependent on tracking and monetizing you. For Mozilla to pretend that they care about "privacy" insults our intelligence (what little we have).

      I work at Mozilla, and whilst I'm happy that the company is financially viable, let me assure you that this is not the first priority of the management team!
      Management at Mozilla have demonstrated time and again that they are willing to throw resources at risky projects without any monetization strategy: Firefox OS, WebRTC, BrowserId/Persona, WebGL, asm.js (gaming on the web), WebVR (Virtual Reality on the Web), Daala (Video codec).

      So make no mistake management as well as most of the employees at Mozilla are quite idealistic. Sure pragmatic compromises are made, EME (DRM) was a hard compromise, but without it FF would become as irrelevant (like distros by FSF), and from a purely pragmatic approach EME is a lot safer than crappy plugins like Flash, Silverlight, etc. which is what users would otherwise use.

      On topic I heard really positive things about some of the aggressive tracking protection experiments, like 40% speed up for page load. However, such features (like adblocking) can be controversial because they break compatibility and in countries like the US it can open you up to lawsuits from publishers.