The problem with that kind of blocking is that most of these are being hosted on large, multi-tenant infrastructure, where that IP address can correspond to many different web sites -- some tracking-related, and others not. Even if they weren't, you're describing a huge, mostly manual effort that goes well beyond the resources anyone would dedicate for this kind of heuristic mitigation.

You don't even need that.

In DNS, a CNAME record just says "instead of a.b.com, go look at x.y.com" And then "x.y.com" resolves to, say, 192.0.2.7.

The trivial and obvious workaround is to just setup a.b.com to point directly to 192.0.2.7. It's a little more overhead to administer than CNAME aliasing (since you need all such domains to update if the IP address changes, although you could automate this), but it's way less work than running a proxy.

There are two big points of confusion in this write up.

The first is the relationship between COVID and the loss of revenue. In rough terms, the amount of money that Google pays for search referrals is proportional to the money that those referrals produce. COVID has hit a large number of companies pretty hard, making Google's ad placements plummet (which you can see in Google's recent shareholder reports). So, while the number of Firefox search referrals since March has gone up significantly, the amount paid out per referral has cratered. To be clear, market share decline hasn't helped the situation; but without a major catastrophe like COVID, the chances of layoffs in 2020 were as close to zero as to make no difference.

The second is the question of cash reserves. Mozilla has historically saved *significant* portions of its income in a "rainy day" fund to absorb short-term catastrophes and make occasional strategic acquisitions. If you check the audit report for 2018, you'll see that Mozilla has over $622 million in assets, approximately $482 million of which is liquid or can be quickly made liquid. (This number is, I believe, *substantially* higher in 2020, in part due to the Yahoo/Verizon/Oath settlement, although details haven't yet been released; look for numbers in the 2019 audit report when it comes out). With a gross operating budget of about $450 million, Mozilla could literally operate with zero income -- absolute zero -- for over a year before running out of cash reserves. I don't pretend to know the strategic rationale, but there was an executive decision taken to pursue layoffs and remain budget neutral for 2020 rather than dipping into the cash reserves.

Yeah, it's a well-known problem that Amazon -- even on the US store -- doesn't seem interested in investing resources to fix. I think they're going to need a multi-billion-dollar class action suit before they take it seriously. Sadly, this will probably only happen after a serious injury, loss of life, or massive property damage. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Fte...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.merriam-webster.co...

sooth adjective [süth]

(Entry 1 of 2)

1 archaic : true

2 archaic : soft, sweet

sooth noun

Definition of sooth (Entry 2 of 2)

1 : truth, reality

2 obsolete : blandishment

Click the gear in the upper right corner of that page. Unselect anything you don't want to appear. Viola! Disabled.

If this were true, they would have pushed for the privacy rules to be clarified rather than repealed.

This is very much a case of "you shat that bed, now you get to lie in it." Zero sympathy for the carriers here.

The '90's just called and they want their webservers back.

With a data point of one, it appears that people who use tabs might not understand the technology they're using. This may have explanatory power.

As a standalone statistic, 10% isn't very useful, because it's not 10% across the board for everyone. In some ways, it's less impressive than that, and in others, it's much more impressive.

The situation being addressed here is that certain graphics card drivers are notoriously buggy, such that processes that use normal accelerated graphics APIs will randomly crash for certain OS/driver/chipset combinations. Historically, Firefox has had to play whack-a-mole by finding patterns in reported crash data that says, for example, "ATI graphics driver x.y.z, with chipset Foo, under Windows 8, is showing an unusual number of graphics-related crashes, so don't use graphics acceleration on those machines." This results in slower rendering for those users in general; and, for those troublesome combinations that have not yet been blacklisted, you end up with users who see Firefox crash a lot (see, e.g., drinkypoo's comment below).

If you're not one of the people with a magically horrible combination of graphics card, graphics driver, and operating system, then this will make absolutely no difference for you. But for those poor users who have found this sweet spot of graphics card misery, performance will improve immensely (for those on the blacklist) and crash rates will plummet (for those who are not). And these users crash *so* *often* that just providing this workaround for their bad graphics card drivers will make *overall* Firefox crash rates go down 10%.

Hard data on *early* experimentation here the final numbers look even better: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fashughes.com%2F%3Fp%3D374

If you've been to Holland, you'll notice that the drivers are extremely careful -- it would be hard to get hit by a car. I'm certain these light-lines are to keep pedestrians from getting run over by bicycles. In Holland, I think bikes actually earn points, Deathrace-2000-style, for aiming at pedestrians.

I find it amusing that you would say Firefox -- which has approximately as many monthly active users as the population of the United States -- "has withered away". It's easy to get lost trying to untangle percentage market share from absolute market share.

What's interesting about a lot of these fingerprinting metrics is that they aren't the result of just asking something like "navigator.getCoreCount()" -- these are sophisticated techniques that run very carefully crafted bits of code, and then measure the time certain operations take in order to deduce the number of effective cores. There's really no way to "lie" other than to intentionally be slow.

Mozilla is; there's just not much marketing around it.

To be clear, the level of de-featuring you're asking for makes for pretty good privacy, but a shitty modern browser. However, Mozilla is strongly committed to the prospect that the trade-off between features and privacy should remain in users' hands, which is why we work very closely with the Tor project to produce a browser that does exactly what you're proposing. The reason Firefox doesn't do this out of the box is that a browser that has been de-featured in this way does not come close to fitting the average user's needs. But you have choices, and Mozilla is committed to supporting Tor Browser to give people like you exactly what you're asking for.

In case you missed it, Mozilla recently started taking Tor's modifications in as part of core Firefox code, both to make thing easier for the team that maintains Tor Browser, and to allow users to turn certain Tor-provided privacy-focused features on in base Firefox.