Re:Open research, stronger privacy: Making Firefox users har...
by jon128 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @11:42AM
(#50455440)
See, this is more along what I expect from a place that titles itself "Hacker News".
The reason I mentioned 2nd order and 3rd order cognitive abstraction, is because to fix the web we need to make some tough decisions.
When technical enthusiasts such as people who call themselves "engineer" but aren't real engineers hear these things the response is "nobody is going to do $thing lol". Yet the more big brains are indeed talking about doing thing or lamenting the mal-growth we have collectively experienced, including the recognized inventor of the WWW.
The below is just off the top of my head, "in passing". Some people have done some work on parts of this picture already.
Among those is content-addressing
The major thing is no more untrusted Javascript and no more untrusted WASM unless loaded in a pop-up window as "external program". See the Free Software Foundation's stance on non-free Javascript. This stance isn't so "out there" to legitimate hackers.
Due to decisions made early on with processors and the feedback loop optimizing for certain styles of programming, our CPUs do speculative execution. Some developments have helped, but the only safe option for CPUs people actually use, which are not the second or third latest generation (often for chipset security concerns), require disabling Javascript JIT and WASM or Javascript all together.
Almost all of the widgets and doodads we need for the web have been figured out by now. We need a trusted collection of libraries for these things. This should include all of the extra fonts we want.
Any GPU/canvas stuff needs to be truly deterministic so as to be useless for fingerprinting.
No more User Agent string.
Cookies need to be handled in a way that users can hover over a browser tab and see what cookies are visible to the remote end of that browser tab, and cross-domain cookies must be explicitly allowed by a user.
There are very tough decisions and things that do require serious talent to innovate correctly in a way intuitive to users, that need to happen to eliminate
fingerprinting.
It's not those incapable of 3rd order cognitive abstraction who are going to dig us out of this mess. It's people who actually give a shit and think about these things a lot who will quietly implement the fixes and will never be renowned or heard of by the crab bucket mentality monkeys unless someone in authority tells them too.
The reason I mentioned 2nd order and 3rd order cognitive abstraction, is because to fix the web we need to make some tough decisions.
When technical enthusiasts such as people who call themselves "engineer" but aren't real engineers hear these things the response is "nobody is going to do $thing lol". Yet the more big brains are indeed talking about doing thing or lamenting the mal-growth we have collectively experienced, including the recognized inventor of the WWW.
The below is just off the top of my head, "in passing". Some people have done some work on parts of this picture already.
Among those is content-addressing
The major thing is no more untrusted Javascript and no more untrusted WASM unless loaded in a pop-up window as "external program". See the Free Software Foundation's stance on non-free Javascript. This stance isn't so "out there" to legitimate hackers.
Due to decisions made early on with processors and the feedback loop optimizing for certain styles of programming, our CPUs do speculative execution. Some developments have helped, but the only safe option for CPUs people actually use, which are not the second or third latest generation (often for chipset security concerns), require disabling Javascript JIT and WASM or Javascript all together.
Almost all of the widgets and doodads we need for the web have been figured out by now. We need a trusted collection of libraries for these things. This should include all of the extra fonts we want.
Any GPU/canvas stuff needs to be truly deterministic so as to be useless for fingerprinting.
No more User Agent string.
Cookies need to be handled in a way that users can hover over a browser tab and see what cookies are visible to the remote end of that browser tab, and cross-domain cookies must be explicitly allowed by a user.
There are very tough decisions and things that do require serious talent to innovate correctly in a way intuitive to users, that need to happen to eliminate fingerprinting.
It's not those incapable of 3rd order cognitive abstraction who are going to dig us out of this mess. It's people who actually give a shit and think about these things a lot who will quietly implement the fixes and will never be renowned or heard of by the crab bucket mentality monkeys unless someone in authority tells them too.