There is a new advertising toggle in Firefox 128.
Mozilla is prototyping this feature in order to inform an emerging Web standard designed to help sites understand how their ads perform without collecting data about individual people. By offering sites a non-invasive alternative to cross-site tracking, we hope to achieve a significant reduction in this harmful practice across the web.
…
this will surely be about as effective as their idiotic “don’t track me” nonsense, but that’s par for the course for the billion dollar Mozilla corp which, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t seem to need Google to remain solvent, yet still begs for donations from users … which are used to fund some highly unethical political and social causes, including those of domestic terrorists “such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter who spent 2020 inciting, burning, bombing, looting, beating, killing and defunding police departments”, rather than Firefox development
what’s really comical about the new standard they’re attempting to set, is that they’re rolling it out during the age of surveillance capitalism, meaning they’re a couple decades too late
unfortunately Firefox, or, better yet, LibreWolf, a soft fork, are the only functional, capable and highly extendable open source web browsers that i’m aware of that still care about end user privacy, at least at the developer level anyway, and Firefox is still supporting manifest v3 which is crucial for various extensions, such as content blockers - how long it will take them to scrap that is anybody’s guess, but i don’t see support for MV3 continuing over the horizon
meanwhile, Firefox market share continues to tank and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Mozilla pulled the plug on Firefox at some point in the not so distant future - i think some of the Firefox devs are at odds with the “woke” corporate agenda which is obviously anti-free speech and anti-open web, and it’s a shame because Mozilla once deserved a lot of credit for picking up the Netscape project and keeping it open source
Also, the search bar is now a toolbar customization instead of a toggle in the preferences.
Before:
After:
I noticed this because there appears to be no way to turn search history off for the search bar in version 128. And then I noticed the whole bar appears to be missing from preferences now.
They seem to be promoting the awesome bar for some reason.
I found a little information in the blog and release notes.
For users in the US and Canada, Firefox will now show your recent searches or currently trending searches when you open the Address Bar to get you back to your previous search session or inspire your next one.
More streamlined menus that reduce visual clutter and prioritize top user actions so you can get to the important things quicker.
And, some users have mentioned these issues.
I recently noticed recent searches appearing in the separate search bar.
that box also keeps a record of my searches
Also, the subject of this last thread is that you can no longer press enter to go to your default search provider’s home page.
yeah, the combining of the search and address bar started long ago - i advise people in my guides to always use the search bar to search because it’s too easy to send personal/private data unintentionally when using the “awesome” bar
i also advise that people sanitize the search plugins to avoid feeding the Mozilla Monster - they do not need nor deserve the money they get from search engine partnerships
i’m still not 110% convinced that LibreWolf is the way to go and i still haven’t made the switch myself, primarily because these projects are run by very small teams, can dry up overnight, and introduce added bugs, but i don’t think it’s a bad choice at all and it’s certainly a super easy way for the privacy conscious to install a fully baked browser without having to worry about Mozilla’s forced system add-ons, the arkenfox config, etc.
*nix users just need to be sure they keep it updated and Windows users … well, they simply don’t really care about their privacy or the privacy of the people they communicate with
all of that stuff, and more, is here
i do recall seeing something about a supposedly major browser project in the works but didn’t bother bookmarking it since, if it becomes a thing, it’ll surely hit the websites i watch
