But it hasn’t landed in a Firefox release yet. Nightly is literally “someone wrote some code yesterday, and it’s in Nightly today”. Anything can still change, e.g. settings, defaults, anything. There is still lots of room for the community to give input before actual users encounter it.

t’s like with the hiding of sub directories in the URL bar of Firefox for Android, it sucks and people would’ve said beforehand

I mean, it’s still beforehand. It’s only in Nightly.

Where did you get that from? That doesn’t match at all what I have read. (At least not when it comes to this system - but maybe you’re talking about Google’s Topics API?)

Looks like this was intentional, to save some maintenance overhead, since alternatives exist: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907034

Yeah, I get why it’s there and agree that it’s probably a good default. It’s also something I wouldn’t want for myself and would be happy to toggle.

I also realise that we’re all just talking about Nightly. I’m hoping the toggle appears at some point, will report bugs if I encounter them, and am going to hold back on the outrage for now.

Right. And the proposed system doesn’t allow for that either, as I understand it. Instead, you show ads for baby clothes next to an article about how to burp your baby, and then learn how many people buy baby clothes via that article without knowing anything about the people reading that article.

But I feel like selling my privacy to massive firms so that they can analyze my habits to serve me ads about things I would be statistically more likely to buy is a bad solution to this problem.

That’s why they’re looking for an alternative solution, no? As I understand it, this only tells advertisers which ads get clicked on how often, without sharing any data about you specifically.

So how come you know about this before it’s been generally enabled?

We didn’t used to have tracking, you know? You used to just put up a billboard or put an ad in the newspaper and you just hoped it’d lead to new customers.

Even back then people tried to find ways to measure the effectiveness of the campaigns. For example, you’d get a discount if you passed a coupon or a coupon code, which would tell the seller that your purchase was in response to the ad.

It’s pretty painful how quickly wrong information spreads. I’m sure it’s not intentional, but that doesn’t really make it better…

It’s not on mobile yet, it’s only on specific websites, and as I understand it, it doesn’t even do anything unless you click an ad.

Which is completely different from Chrome’s system, which sends information about you to websites regardless - and they haven’t even fenced off third-party cookies yet!

And none of the outraged people has actually described how information about you would actually be known to advertisers, so I don’t see why people assume it will be.

Well, that depends on the website, I assume?

Of course, Firefox already partitioned (and can block, if you enable Strict Tracking Protection and accept some extra breakage) cookies, so those more invasive ads were already neutered. Unlike e.g. Chrome, whose Topics API proactively reports characteristics about you before you click an ad, and does so while third-party cookies are still allowed too.

The comic, for today’s lucky 10 000.

So you won’t even notice this if:

• you don’t click, or block, ads, or
• you never visit a website that’s part of the origin trial.

Heh, I think I’ve seen this before, but back then I did not notice the hands in panel 3.

Why does Deutsche Welle use the American date notation?

Ah OK, that “everything” solution sounds perfect for me, thanks!

How do you know what fixes/Wine variants you need?

Yeah, it all still is more experimental than I’d hope. The whole reason I’m using Silverblue is low maintenance and less risk.

The plus side is that it didn’t render my system unusable - I could boot into the old version. But hopefully lessons will have been learned, and this will happen less often in the future.