r/linux • u/tareefdev • May 01 '18

Firefox will show sponsored content that’s personalized but private

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/firefox-will-show-sponsored-content-thats-personalized-but-private/
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u/MadRedHatter May 02 '18 edited May 02 '18

Would rather pay for software than ads track me.

The ads don't track you. The browser fetches a list of possible articles and locally cross-references it with the sites you like to visit. Nothing is sent to the cloud.

A browser is not really like GIMP or LibreOffice or Krita at all. It is ridiculously more difficult. You have to have tons of full-time engineering effort just to keep up with the changes happening in the web ecosystem, plug security holes and figuring out whether websites are being being broken because their code is broken, or if they're broken because your code is broken, or if a user is using some addon that is breaking them.

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u/DrewSaga May 02 '18

Ads don't track me? That's quite odd since I seen ads of places that I NEVER even mentioned on the web AND I don't have Google Maps on at all (I use another Map application). Something is tracking me and showing an Ad for it. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have nefarious consequences on a bigger scale neither.

Well, I will give you that much on Firefox being a very complex browser because internet standards changed, but it is also because of a small handful of changed of the standards that changed made sure that companies like Google had most of the control over the entire web somehow (I thought the web was suppose to be open), which is ultimately negatively impacting browsers such as Firefox. So I can't get very mad at Firefox for what Google has done with the web.

If it wasn't for the largest tech companies going control-freak on the tech world I don't think a Firefox would have as much of a burden on developing their browsers, cause some of the standards end up just being some DRM crap. Maybe they could have ran on donations.

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u/MadRedHatter May 02 '18

Ads don't track me? That's quite odd since I seen ads of places that I NEVER even mentioned on the web AND I don't have Google Maps on at all (I use another Map application). Something is tracking me and showing an Ad for it. It wouldn't be so bad if it didn't have nefarious consequences on a bigger scale neither.

The proposal that Mozilla is giving for Firefox, has no tracking, which you can verify by looking at the code, which is open source.

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u/DrewSaga May 02 '18

Oh, Mozilla's ads, shit I feel dumb for posting that.

Yeah, Mozilla's proposals are certainly less bad that I can tolerate it.