> But of course I wasn’t because Chrome doesn’t have the same privacy- and security-enhancing designs
Maybe I’m missing something but it seems the conflation was by the article author, not me?
To be clear, I don’t even use Chrome, in part because “Google bad”. This just isn’t intellectually honest.
> Eventually, I found some suggestions that if you’re using Firefox you can disable the privacy.resistFingerprinting option in the about:config page. But that was already listed as false for me when I got stuck, so I switched the value to true just to see if that would do anything.
> And that worked!Firefox on Android was still working, though, loathe as I am to put passwords of any significance on my phone. Doesn't directly address your question, which I'd like to know the answer to as well.
Back in the day, my university would load balance based on the browser being used. When results were released every semester, all you needed to do to switch to the fast lane instead of contending with other students for resources was jump on IE (or even spoof your user agent). None of this was public knowledge.
I say this just to make the point that people do all sorts of weird stuff with web infrastructure. The inferences made in this privacy nut’s blog post seem a bit off the cuff.
Absolutely not, it is not reasonable or expected that a credit card company launch a website that doesn't work with Firefox.
> Back in the day, my university would load balance based on the browser being used.
What on earth?
To your specific point about just moving elsewhere, complaining in public about bad industry practices is part of Capitalism and part of how consumers regulate the free market. "Take your business elsewhere instead of complaining" has never really been how this has worked; businesses don't get to opt out of being shamed just because they have a cancellation form, and they shouldn't have any expectation that users will or should be quiet about their bad business practices. The free market is not a replacement for criticism within social spaces; the free market works alongside that criticism and is reinforced by that criticism.
Public complaining is an essential part of how consumers within a free market coordinate with each other and educate each other about abusive corporate behavior, and it serves as an additional mechanism alongside boycotts and cancellations to help punish bad actors in the market.
Oh well, what can you do? Vote with your wallet. Tell everyone on HN and Reddit. I agree. But at a certain point it wastes too much of my energy, so I'll basically just cancel cand tell them I can not use their service because reasons, very disappointed, bye.
Sigh
In terms of being blocked by CloudFront (not cloudflare),I actually got a website to fix their policies by just emailing their tech support and showing that simple user-agent changes bypasses their policy anyhow.
My high-level understanding is that they're going to run an ML model over your browsing history (locally on your device) to build a list of "topics" that you care about. Sites you browse can use the Topics API to pull a set of these interests from the browser to show you "relevant" ads. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this standard.
>> Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed
> What information does Chrome provide in this scenario that Firefox doesn’t?
Is Cloudflare using an as yet unshipped API as part of DDOS protection?
But this new API demonstrates that Google is not on the consumers side when it comes to limiting tracking/data gathering ability, as the new API is explicitly for fingerprinting.
Whether Mozilla/Apple/others agree is a different story. The blowback has mostly been around how topics aren't perfect and the design still leaves room for abuse and therefor effectively devolves to traditional tracking: https://mozilla.github.io/ppa-docs/topics.pdf.
The argument from supporters is that this is a step away from the “fingerprint and track” status quo MO. The argument from detractors is that it doesn't quite achieve that goal.
All you need to address your concern is for access to the API to be user-configurable.
And it should be behind a permissions prompt
But that’s exactly what I’m saying: the author asserts as fact the reason Chrome worked was because it gives up more personal information but there’s no interrogation of whether that’s actually true and if true, how it’s achieved.
I’m no defender of Google I just believe we should be making arguments we’re able to actually back up.
If the site is serving Google, Meta, or ads from other networks, your unique browser fingerprint is one of the tools that makes it possible to target and retarget you.
I think the fingerprinting is a red herring. Yes, Chrome is less secure. But Chrome worked.
It's quite possible someone at the author's workplace updated their Cloudflare WAF settings and made things more strict, causing more checks. I'd even offer that a Firefox extension might be contributing.
But the argument that Chrome worked because it offered Cloudflare personal information is pretty out there ;)
(I know it's a fork, but the actual engine is still mostly Chromium.)
But yes, 3 is all we're left with outside of a few bespoke projects...
Servo doesn't have a browser but I'd wager that writing a full featured browser for Servo would be much more useful than another Blink browser
“The Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web. This data is automatically collected by Chrome from users who have opted in, . . .”
Taken from https://web.dev/crux-and-rum-differences/
I harden my Firefox installations, and therefore this website comparison isn't useful.
The site that morjom posted gives you a simple overview and Firefox is known for the privacy preserving features it comes with. However, you are right, that it is an inexact science as long as we don't know the logic of the Cloudflare implementation.
I have ublock, privacy badger, decentraleyes, canvas blocker, facebook disconnect, and duckduckgo privacy essentials installed.
I would go through and disable each extension in order to see if it was the cause of the issue, and so far, every single time it has been duckduckgo privacy essentials that is breaking websites for me.
I think I should remove it at this point, but who knows? Maybe it's protecting me from something that I don't see.
> Chrome will happily collect as much private information about me and my browsing history and share them with select parties, as needed
What information does Chrome provide in this scenario that Firefox doesn’t? It feels like backward logic: it worked in Chrome therefore it must be because Chrome gave extra info. In reality it could be a whole bunch of things, something as mundane as Firefox being a rarer user agent so subject to more filtering. I have no clue but I wasn’t persuaded that it’s because Chrome was giving away more information.