It's unfortunate that almost none of the PPA criticisms actually go into depth on why its implementation isn't sufficiently private. It seems there's no desire to actually improve privacy, they'd rather just kill the feature.

If killing PPA meant the internet would suddenly be advertising free, I would be 110% on board, but that's not going to happen. Advertising is the dominant business model on the web and it's not going away. The alternative to privacy respecting advertising is the malware-ridden surveillance machine that exists today.

Yes, on an individual level you can mostly opt-out of this surveillance nightmare by using pi hole, uBlock origin, AdGuard etc. I do so myself. But keep in mind that this solution only works because of the 95% of users who do not use these tools and thus subsidize your browsing.

They deserve privacy too. So I'm holding out hope that Mozilla and others can succeed in developing a truly privacy protecting solution.

A relevant article from July with information how to disable the "feature": https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2024/07/14/mozilla-di...

Personally I've been using FF for the last 4 years even though I consider it a worse experience, but I'm becoming disilusioned with it and considering moving to LibreWolf. I'm also interested in trying Orion (by Kagi), but haven't had the time yet.

The most annoying aspect of this is how Mozilla have tried to sneak it in without telling anyone.

By not being up front they’ve joined the users are just product crew.

It's unfortunate how all the browsers are in cahoots with the ad industry.

Some previous discussion (on Moz making this on-by-default): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40952330

I guess there are bigger considerations at work here. Like where the money's coming from that fuels Firefox development.

Still using it though.

With wei/attestation and every site I go to begging me to log in with Google (and only Google) just to use it, it’s clear anonymous browsing will be dead soon.

I’ve gone back to Brave. I really want to support a non-Chromium engine but Firefox have constantly slyly added features for its entire history. You need only open about:config and search for “telemetry” as an example.

I honestly don’t know why people always rush to Firefox’s defense when their track record is as bad as Brave’s. The amount of hoops I have to jump through to get a private Firefox after installing it is significant. Even their latest update the other day re-enabled search recommendations.

All posts like these, and all comments here up till now just don’t mention the Real Solution: Allow ads, forbid user targeted ads.

If a site can not exist based on that instead of the current ads ‘needing 1337 partners’, tough luck.

Also: maybe if targetting isnt allowed anymore, the value of the normal ads might increase a bit.

I know this will be an unpopular opinion, but I was a chrome user for well over a decade. I spent the last year or so trying to switch to Firefox (and did) because google implemented something similar to this in chrome.

I used it for a year and then I switched back to chrome about 3mo ago because the writing was on the wall that Mozilla was going down the same route, just more slowly and a few years behind. I don’t see a reason to use Firefox if it’s going to have the same “features” that I just have disable in chrome, when chrome is still more performant.

It’s really unfortunate that every alternative to chrome is either measurably slower or just a fork of chrome.

Set dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled to false in about:config and problem solved. Not the first thing you should disable there and not the last.

What's worse: The opt-out option is not even present in the mobile firefox app.

Hm, not sure if I did something against that already, but for me the option in about:preferences was unchecked and also I am unable to check it. I am not sure why that is, anyone has an idea?

Opt-out is simply a violation of the EU GDPR. For me as an EU citizen it was checked after the update. I hope the data protection agencies have the capacity to punish this behavior, sadly a lot of bad actors still get away because there aren’t enough resources.

It's become painfully obvious Mozilla has abandon Firefox and are just exploiting what's left of it's reputation for profit. It time to fork Firefox and kick Mozilla to the curb.