brave is a good browser, and unlike firefox, doesn't leak memory with tons of tabs. you should use it.

Why

Does this make any difference at all to the tracking?

But hypothetically if Google stopped contributing to Chromium the project would be forked and it would live on. Frankly, Google removing themselves from Chromium would fix the one major complaint a lot of people have with it.

Everybody just gives up at the slightest inconvenience and uses Chrome.

It's not even that much work to just use Firefox.

Keep up the good fight.

Completely immune from this and you don't need to worry that toggle will get mysteriously turn back on.

This isn't iPhone vs Android. This isn't vim vs emacs. You can switch browsers in 5 minutes and never notice any meaningful difference.

Degoogle today.

switching to brave is no better

But, otoh, maybe perfect is the enemy of good here.

I will be caustious with such statement.

https://github.com/patcg-individual-drafts/ipa/

IPA now allows these companies to track users across multiple IP addresses, and regardless of the user's cookie settings, via a unique tracking identifier. It is also proposed that the operating system provides the unique tracking identifier which can then be used by all applications or browsers on a device, allowing different devices behind a single IP address to be distinguished.

Mozilla is one of the authors.

Any more info on IPA? That link doesn't even say what the acronym stands for. I couldn't figure out how it's supposed to work, too complicated. Wikipedia doesn't seem to have heard of it, and a cursory websearch didn't offer an explanation.

> Mozilla is one of the authors.

Mozilla as a company, or is it that there are Mozilla developers contributing? If Mozilla are planning to introduce a built-in tracking system to Firefox, doesn't that imply shooting off your one remaining foot?

So it looks like Interoperable Private Attribution is mostly Meta people; there's one guy from Mozilla, Eric Rescorla. Eric is not notable for adtech achievements; he's notable for his contributions to internet privacy, and security and cryptography.

[Edit] More detail: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KpdSKD8-Rn0bWPTu4UtK54ks...

Apparently the proposal is to store the match key in browser local storage; which means that you can block it by setting local storage to zero, or by regularly cleaning-out local storage.

That article doesn't mention once the privileges that should be granted to the user. It does mention the powers of the user agent, but that really means the browser manufacturer.

I think Firefox is the least shitty option here.

Using Firefox Developer edition and toggle(s) will get mysteriously turned back on all the time. And Mozilla is not immune to this practice at all for standard Firefox.

Use chromium-ungoogled [1] if you want chrome(ium) without Google-specific stuff.

[1] https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/rel...

https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/c/ch...

There's often days you're going without security patches. If you want a browser without Google tracking, Firefox is a much better choice.

It's difficult to deal with because as the code evolves, so do the configuration settings. The rate of change is high, and it's not always obvious what is relevant to users (and whether a new feature increases or decreases privacy!), so it's hard to communicate this in release notes.

Show someone how to do it, and they can be asked to show someone else

    In descending order of significance (i.e. most important objective first):

    1. ungoogled-chromium is Google Chromium, sans dependency on Google web services.
    2. ungoogled-chromium retains the default Chromium experience as closely as possible.
       Unlike other Chromium forks that have their own visions of a web browser, ungoogled-chromium is essentially a drop-in replacement for Chromium.
    3. ungoogled-chromium features tweaks to enhance privacy, control, and transparency.
       However, almost all of these features must be manually activated or enabled. For more details, see Feature Overview.

Harder to distribute than unzip-and-run binaries.

You can't eliminate that anywhere.

  brave://settings/system/shortcuts

For me it is better UX.

Mozilla did worse things than brave, at least brave actually does privacy by default rather than just talk about it!

What worse things did Mozilla do?

Embrace: Embrace the open web, create an excellent product and aggressively promote it until you take over the market

Extend: Chrome experiments and advanced features that improve the user experience and developer experience through Chrome only API and Google services. Even provide these services to everyone who wants to use them free or charge so that the user expectations are elevated to that point and web businesses depend on these by building their products around them. Maybe make developers depend on this "topics" feature even.

Exterminate: Cut off or degrade the free services to 3rd party browsers, remove or tame extensions that harm your business and recoup the costs of the free services. Since you no longer have viable competition, reduce the development of Chrome any further, optimize only for profit. Developers who depend on you ad tech can choose to refuse serving users using another browser or opt out of Google verification or account services? The users will stay like they sat with IE.

IE of the 2020s.

Try Chromium?

Decide the site is too much hassle and back away?

Not always practical options, but they are options.

My personal answer to the goalposts in this new position: If a site refuses to work without a Google account, or if Google Ads are blocked, or without some other Google service, they are simply making it clear that I am not the target audience for their broken creation and I should mosey on elsewhere. Much like sites that refuse to work because my stalker blocking measures at home block their adverts (accidentally or, more likely, because those ads are from source that is trying to stalk me across the Internet).

As I said above: this attitude might not be practical for all, or for some all of the time. But it hasn't done me any harm thus far.

--

[1] I switched to Chrome a few years ago when FF went through a period of being unstable²

[2] and because certain extensions didn't have good FF alternatives, because they never were or because some were crippled by the changes in ~2017³, but that latter point is fairly moot as Google is now taking their turn to work towards crippling useful extensions

[3] at least FF's change here were mostly due to massively misreading the room while trying to streamline their platform, where Google's seem to be more malicious when you consider most of the affected extensions are ones that go against their primary business of tracking people & selling adverts.

[4] things breaking after updates, periods of general instability, not keeping up in the performance race for a while, etc.

The deception is to make people believe that studying them as ad targets through their internet use can be "private". Many will believe this nonsense. Including regulators. "It's OK, folks. Privacy is preserved." Green light to keep on tracking, collecting data and serving ads.

But the study of people's internet use to enable programmtic advertising _is_ the problem. There will be more ads. They will be more personal. The www will become even more annoying. Perhaps moreso than any other medium that has come before it.

To Mozilla, there can be no www without advertising. The truth is that there can be no so-called "tech" companies, monopolisng intermediaries, without programmatic internet advertising. The www does not need it and the original www did not have it.

First Mozilla partners with Yahoo. Then Google. Perhaps Meta will be next. Mozilla is no different than so-called "tech" companies in at least one regard: it cannot find a "business model" besides internet advertising.

https://analyticsindiamag.com/despite-clashes-in-the-past-mo...

https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/ipa-the-meta-and-mozilla...

https://www.admonsters.com/eletters/mozilla-and-metas-ipa-fr...