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This basically amounts to "Firefox users become Chrome users" since the motivation (anger) is high and the barrier (setting up everything all over again) is same...

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Bryan Steele

@canadianbryan

May 4, 2019

Crazy, it's looking more like users will need both a Firefox update and re-install all extensions/addons. Yikes.

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Also, users like me who are in the Google ecosystem and were slowly gathering energy to move off Chrome and switch to Firefox, well, the grass isn't that much greener over there, is it? Back to inertia and apathy.

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I'm sure that other Chromium-based browsers like Brave are picking up a lot of users too. I personally stopped using Firefox on Android because they showed no sign of ever implementing a sandbox in the near future, let alone one with site isolation to stop Spectre leaks, etc.

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I haven't used it on the desktop since a decade ago, but I used it on Android for uBlock Origin. I'd rather just use a Chromium-based browser with comparable filtering built into it, but uBlock Origin is still significantly better than the built-in filtering engine options.

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Could you please give more details : why unblock origin is so much better than filtering lists? (AFAIR, it uses EasyList and EasyPrivacy)

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It's a particularly good implementation able to block more of the connections based on which content isn't needed, along with having some extensions to the filter syntax. It uses more than EasyList and EasyPrivacy. Other implementations aren't able to block as much of it.

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It's a best effort stopgap measure as a form of attack surface reduction and uBlock Origin does it best. I don't believe in blacklisting as a way to fundamentally improve privacy since it's very incomplete, easily bypassed and is pushing advertising / tracking to being 1st party.

4:37 PM · May 4, 2019Twitter Web Client

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I think the end result of increasing usage of client-side filtering is going to be a strong move towards the tracking / advertising being heavily integrated into site functionality, without an easy way to remove it. Server-side middleware makes this easy for the site operators.

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But the party who wants the tracking can't trust that the site isn't falsifying data, and there's a huge commercial incentive to falsify it. That's why killing third party content is such a good approach.

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UBO lets you block all third-party scripts, with an exception list. Requires a bit more work but doesn't suffer from the problem of a deny list approach.

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The issue is that an increasing amount of the tracking is done via code served by the first party. If you take a look at sites like Twitter, Reddit, nytimes.com, etc. they are doing extensive analytics / tracking via first party code, often code made by third parties.

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I've ended up using uMatrix, uBlock Origin and Cookie AutoDelete on my smartphone, just like I did already on my laptop and my desktop computer. Granted, it's a bit of work at the beginning, but works well enough for me.