We are pleased to announce that Firefox 87 will introduce a stricter, more privacy-preserving default Referrer Policy. From now on, by default, Firefox will trim path and query string information from referrer headers to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data.
Good move.
This is over due.
There are still a lot more areas to go. Like reducing down items that can be used to browser finger print. Really why cannot we have a set of fonts for the internet that all browsers have the same ones.
It’s not obvious to an outsider but this kind of a task requires that edge cases be understood because it’s a fundamental browser behavior.
As for the fonts, good point. We need more of those to be in the browser installer.
Changes like this are welcome. Also, stopping 3rd party cookies finally made an important step for privacy as well. IMHO these things should have happened long ago, but it’s better late than never, haha.
This is slightly O/T, but I am getting more concerned about firefox’s relevancy to the market. Firefox is the browser I install/use on all computers here by default, however my children’s schools are requiring my kids to do instructional classwork on sites that won’t work under firefox. For example: the login form at scholastic doesn’t work under firefox. I’ve prodded around to check if it’s an ad blocker or something like that, but apparently it only works with chrome based browsers
For better or worse the school’s online presence is quite google-centric, but even so at least google classroom works under firefox. It’s actually the 3rd website my kids have struggled to use under firefox this month. And today one of my kids had trouble during class, so it’s becoming a real problem.
I feel like we’re regressing back to the browser mono-culture of the 2000’s where we would be coerced into using the dominant browser. It’s not as bad as the IE monopoly yet, but I am concerned that the market is failing to deliver diversity once again. Even microsoft gave up on its own edge browser in favor of forking chromium and calling that the edge browser.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worldwide
The more users and developers switch to chrome, the less viable alternatives become
It seems to me that this cycle is part of the market system. This happened with Internet Explorer, as we all remember. Then Firefox eventually broke that monoculture.
Generally when something is “good enough” for most users, this sort of monoculture will arrise until it’s not good enough, at which point the monoculture breaks under its own inability to adapt. I don’t know that it’s optimal, however for better or worse, this is how market forces often work. Attempting to impose too much upon this usually turns out worse for everybody in the end, e.g. see the EU’s browser ballot proposal for an example. You can’t force users not to use something just because it’s a monoculture, and a competitor will not arrise out of a vacuum of need. Other than regulation which is often people’s standard answer and only kicks the problem down the road, how do you break a monoculture other than creating something better which eventually catches on and breaks it?
darknexus,
It depends. Things can be cyclic as long as competition is viable and fair, but when you’ve got monopolies a lot of that tends to go out the window. You can have entities become so dominant that the threat of competition is nil. In the absence of regulators to balance the field, there’s no natural mechanism to come back from the positive feedback loops that keep incumbents in power, unfortunately. The game of monopoly is illustrative here, short of altruism, there’s no way to break the positive feedback loop that leads to dominant players taking control of everything. All assets end up working for those already at the top. Even if all other players work together it’s not enough.
Obviously the real world is more complex, there’s more than one market and new markets bring new opportunities. We’ve been fortunate to have new markets to keep capitalism afloat in the past century, but there are two reasons I question whether this is truly sustainable in the long run: 1) a lot of the markets are becoming mature and It’s not a forgone conclusion that there will always be opportunities for new players to take root, and 2) these multi-trillion dollar corporations can use their financial leverage to amass even more power across markets. I think meta-monopolies may be in our future if we fail to stop it
I understand the reluctance to put any faith in regulators. Our governments have been unwilling & unable to get shit done.I hate to admit it, but our governments are so corrupt now that they are little more than an extension of corporate interests who want everything under get turned over to private control with no oversight. And this proves detrimental time and time again, like the banking/housing collapses, or rubber stamping that allowed Boeing to fasttrack planes with inadequate testing before they were airworthy leading to loss of life, or the public disaster caused by deregulated power authorities in texas, or even the non-competitiveness of US broadband in general compared to the rest of the world. It’s easy to point out all the ways laissez-faire capitalism fails us, but finding a way to fix it is elusive in large part because corporate lobbyists are always there to make sure the government can’t/won’t take a leading role in fixing anything.
Unless things change somehow and we put a stop to the mass consolidation of power, I do worry that future generations will end up increasingly working for and being dependent upon the capitalistic robber barons who will own just about everything.
They’ve also added support code for pages to work with trackers blocked, and you can also enable project fission, though in my system, it seems like tabs restored from previous sessions are unusable while fission is enabled, though that doesn’t happen in the nightly branch – it’s probably missing additional code found there.
Or just me having forgotten the proton pref enabled.