STOCKHOLM, Sept 25 (Reuters) - Vienna-based advocacy group NOYB on Wednesday said it has filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority against Mozilla accusing the Firefox browser maker of tracking user behaviour on websites without consent.

NOYB (None Of Your Business), the digital rights group founded by privacy activist Max Schrems, said Mozilla has enabled a so-called “privacy preserving attribution” feature that turned the browser into a tracking tool for websites without directly telling its users.

Mozilla had defended the feature, saying it wanted to help websites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering what it called a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, it hoped to significantly reduce collecting individual information.

  • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.

    I’ve heard so much shit lately about Firefox, it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.

    • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
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      3 hours ago

      And what else should be recommended?

      The choice is basically between Firefox or skinned Chromium.

      Do you really want to experience first-hand just why Internet Explorer was this hated?
      Here’s a hint: de facto monopoly on browser market that allowed them to control the web standards back then and their ideas were not good.

      it has become a sinking ship and I’m eager to see who picks up the shards and runs with it.

      I don’t think you have any idea how much work it takes to create a new browser.

      • confusedwiseman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 hours ago

        I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.

        Chrome was great, till it wasn’t. IE always was bad. Edge is chromium.

        Firefox has stayed closer to “don’t be evil” than many companies. Is say far more than the other options.

          • confusedwiseman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 hours ago

            Completely agree. I understood WebKit to be a different browse engine than chromium or Firefox.

            While chromium and Firefox have wider platform options, there’s “kind of” a 3rd runner even though locked to apple.

            I agree Linux and open source is king.

        • sanpo@sopuli.xyz
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          3 hours ago

          I think there’s kind of a 3rd choice, WebKit.

          That’s where Chromium came from originally, so not really 3rd.

          • confusedwiseman@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            2 hours ago

            I was thinking WebKit was closer to Netscape in origin.

            You made me go look it up. 😉 and I think we’re both wrong…. (Here’s my edit…. Poster above is right. I read it wrong, so only I am wrong on the origin of WebKit)

            Below from Wikipedia:

            WebKit started as a fork of the KHTML and KJS software libraries from KDE.

            On April 3, 2013, Google announced that it had forked WebCore, a component of WebKit, to be used in future versions of Google Chrome

    • zecg@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      Hopefully this makes some of the Firefox shills finally realize it’s time to change our recommendations.

      There’s still nothing better, you just have to be careful to block all their moneymaking bullshit attempts like save-your-shit-into-our-pocket and virginity-preserving assfucking. I use Fennec on android, though.

      • myavatar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        4 hours ago

        There are forks, like libre wolf (desktop) and mull (Android) that don’t ship with some of the bullshit, Firefox ships.

        • ZephrC@lemm.ee
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          1 hour ago

          Yeah, and using those is pretty good, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do just by changing settings in Firefox, and if Firefox doesn’t have any users those die right along with it.

      • Gravitywell@sh.itjust.works
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        4 hours ago

        LibreWolf is better, includes ublock and no tracking by default.

        There are good chromium based browsers too, I’m not aware of Vivaldi having any major controversies or shady business decisions in recent years, it has a built in adblock thats independent of chromium’s upstream.

        If you disqualify every browser due to its upstream having issues then you should probably revert to using CURL or something convoluted like what richard stallman does. Every browser that exists today is a fork of some browser that previously was good but started to suck.

        • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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          37 minutes ago

          I don’t think chromium should ever be encouraged. That is the one browser family trying and mostly succeeding at swallowing up the Internet. Google already has way too much power over the Internet, and it will only get worse if people don’t start leaving their ecosystem

    • Nytefyre@kbin.melroy.org
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      4 hours ago

      No they won’t. They’ll double down by saying “UH YEAH BUT UH, NOT AS BAD AS GOOGLE!” like that is going to make it sound better.