Is this a reason for the Youtube slowdown?

Firefox CTO here.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the weekend about the origin trial for a private attribution prototype in Firefox 128. It’s clear in retrospect that we should have communicated more on this one, and so I wanted to take a minute to explain our thinking and clarify a few things. I figured I’d post this here on Reddit so it’s easy for folks to ask followup questions. I’ll do my best to address them, though I’ve got a busy week so it might take me a bit.

The Internet has become a massive web of surveillance, and doing something about it is a primary reason many of us are at Mozilla. Our historical approach to this problem has been to ship browser-based anti-tracking features designed to thwart the most common surveillance techniques. We have a pretty good track record with this approach, but it has two inherent limitations.

First, in the absence of alternatives, there are enormous economic incentives for advertisers to try to bypass these countermeasures, leading to a perpetual arms race that we may not win. Second, this approach only helps the people that choose to use Firefox, and we want to improve privacy for everyone.

This second point gets to a deeper problem with the way that privacy discourse has unfolded, which is the focus on choice and consent. Most users just accept the defaults they’re given, and framing the issue as one of individual responsibility is a great way to mollify savvy users while ensuring that most peoples’ privacy remains compromised. Cookie banners are a good example of where this thinking ends up.

Whatever opinion you may have of advertising as an economic model, it’s a powerful industry that’s not going to pack up and go away. A mechanism for advertisers to accomplish their goals in a way that did not entail gathering a bunch of personal data would be a profound improvement to the Internet we have today, and so we’ve invested a significant amount of technical effort into trying to figure it out.

The devil is in the details, and not everything that claims to be privacy-preserving actually is. We’ve published extensive analyses of how certain other proposals in this vein come up short. But rather than just taking shots, we’re also trying to design a system that actually meets the bar. We’ve been collaborating with Meta on this, because any successful mechanism will need to be actually useful to advertisers, and designing something that Mozilla and Meta are simultaneously happy with is a good indicator we’ve hit the mark.

This work has been underway for several years at the W3C’s PATCG, and is showing real promise. To inform that work, we’ve deployed an experimental prototype of this concept in Firefox 128 that is feature-wise quite bare-bones but uncompromising on the privacy front. The implementation uses a Multi-Party Computation (MPC) system called DAP/Prio (operated in partnership with ISRG) whose privacy properties have been vetted by some of the best cryptographers in the field. Feedback on the design is always welcome, but please show your work.

The prototype is temporary, restricted to a handful of test sites, and only works in Firefox. We expect it to be extremely low-volume, and its purpose is to inform the technical work in PATCG and make it more likely to succeed. It’s about measurement (aggregate counts of impressions and conversions) rather than targeting. It’s based on several years of ongoing research and standards work, and is unrelated to Anonym.

The privacy properties of this prototype are much stronger than even some garden variety features of the web platform, and unlike those of most other proposals in this space, meet our high bar for default behavior. There is a toggle to turn it off because some people object to advertising irrespective of the privacy properties, and we support people configuring their browser however they choose. That said, we consider modal consent dialogs to be a user-hostile distraction from better defaults, and do not believe such an experience would have been an improvement here.

Digital advertising is not going away, but the surveillance parts could actually go away if we get it right. A truly private attribution mechanism would make it viable for businesses to stop tracking people, and enable browsers and regulators to clamp down much more aggressively on those that continue to do so.

Here is how to remove it (confirmed works on my Laptop using Firefox v131.0).

• Go to a new tab and type in "about:config" without quotes, and accept the risk.

• Search for "toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets" without quotes, and set this to true.

• Go to the Firefox settings (≡) on the top right of the browser, go to "Help" and click "More troubleshooting information". (Alternatively, open a new tab and type in "about:support" without quotes).

• Scroll down the table until you find "Profile Folder". Next to it you should see a button that says "Open folder". Click that button.

• A folder should open up with lots of other folders and files. In this folder, create a new folder called "chrome" without quotes, all lowercase.

• Inside this new chrome folder, create a .css file. The full file should be called "userChrome.css" without quotes.

• Edit this new .css file to include the following:

  #alltabs-button { display: none !important; }

• Save the .css file, then restart Firefox.

Here is a ready made "userChrome.css" file for you.

https://gofile.io/d/fPGHIW

Important note: If you already have a "chrome" folder and a "userChrome.css" file, and you find that following the above steps did not work for you, please delete the pre-existing "chrome" folder entirely (including the "userChrome.css" file), and remake them from scratch following the steps above. Firefox should then recognize the file and changes and apply it.

If you already had code within a pre-existing "userChrome.css" file to remove other elements of Firefox, please make a backup copy of that code and follow the steps above. When finished, re-add that code into the new "userChrome.css" file underneath the alltabs code.

v131.0 also enabled tab image preview by default (hovering your mouse over a tab displays a small image of the page under the tab).

To remove this, simply open a new tab, type "about:config" without quotes and accept the risk. Search for "browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled" without quotes, and set this to false.

A few users have stated that they still see an unused space between the Minimize (─), Restore Down (◰), and Close (X) buttons on the top right of the browser and the other titlebar buttons that can be added.

That is called the titlebar spacer. If you would like to remove it, please do the following:

Open a new tab, and type in "about:support" without quotes. Scroll down until you find "Profile Folder" and click the "Open folder" button next to it. Open the "chrome" folder, and edit "userChrome.css". Add this to the .css file:

.titlebar-spacer[type="post-tabs"] {  display: none !important; }

Save the .css file and restart Firefox.

Seems to be a pretty common thread around here today, but also doesn't have any attention or fixes beyond "maybe play with your clock see if that magically works".

And when I try to install anything, I get "Download failed. Please check your connection."

Anybody figure anything out yet? Is it just going away after a while for people?

1. The add-on fiasco was amateur night. If you implement a system reliant on certificates, then you better be damn sure, redundantly damn sure, mission critically damn sure, that it always works.
2. I have been using Firefox since 1.0 and never thought, "What if I couldn't use Firefox anymore?" Now I am thinking about it.
3. The issue with add-ons being certificate-reliant never occurred to me before. Now it is becoming very important to me. I'm asking myself if I want to use a critical piece of software that can essentially be disabled in an instant by a bad cert. I am now looking into how other browsers approach add-ons and whether they are also reliant on certificates. If not, I will consider switching.
4. I look forward to seeing how you address this issue and ensure that it will never happen again. I hope the decision makers have learned a lesson and will seriously consider possible consequences when making decisions like this again. As a software developer, I know if I design software where something can happen, it almost certainly will happen. I hope you understand this as well.

People saying Google keeps Firefox around to avoid monopoly lawsuits and that Firefox would die without that money, been seeing it a lot now that Google is under threat legally.

Is there any truth to this?

Can't wait till the sidebar and vertical tabs come to regular Firefox

I have used your products since 2005. I still remember the leap of innovation and speed after i downloaded Firefox 1.5 after being an idiot and using IE since my first steps into the rabbit hole of the internet back in the late 90's.
Not only did your products work better and faster, they where easy to use and easy to adapt.
3.X was a huge deal. The download manager was just a revolution for my part, Themes was so cool and ad-ons where everywhere. FF4 brought a new UI, sync and support for HTML5 and CSS3. I was in the middle of my degree in UX at the time and having a stable, fast and reliable browser with the support for new tech was a lifesaver during this time. Yes Chrome was a thing by this point, but the only thing Chrome really did good was fast execution of JS. The rest was lack lustre at best.

But then everything stopped. You started to mimic Chrome more and more. It seemed to be more important to get a bigger version number then to actually improve and stabilise. In one year we have gone from version 65 to 75. Sure the product was still useable and good in its own way, but I noticed more and more of my friends switched to Chrome, many now working in UX and web development. I wondered why, and after discussions we more or less ended up at the point that Chrome just works, regardless if you are a technerd or old parents, while FF more and more turns in to this beast you have to tame for every major update. Ad-ons just stop working, functions are moved or even removed, and I find myself sitting more and more in about:config for every major release.

Today, logging in on my PC with my morning coffee ready to go trough my standard assortment or news, media and memes I notice FF has updated during the night to version 75. And lord and behold the URL bar has turned into an absolute mess. Gone is my drop-down menu witch used to show me my top-20 pages. and instead it's replaced with this Chrome knock off that shows random order, less than half the content, and also pops up in my face regardless if I want to search or go to one of my regular sites. It's nothing but half useable but now also requires way more use of the keyboard to get things done. It screams bad UX. Not only this but all my devices have for some reason been logged out of FF Sync and user data for some extensions is reset.

And here we are again. 3 hours in, back in about:config and deep into forums and Google to figure out what setting to put to False or change a 0 to 1 so I can have my old URLbar back and get ad-ons and extensions working again. At this point I'm just waiting for my mum to call asking about wtf happened to her internet icon thingy.

Firefox was the browser where you could customise and make it your own while still providing a fast, and reliable experience. These days are behind us and we are getting more and more into the Apple mindset of "take what we give you and fuck off". Ad-ons and extensions have lost support of their developers, stability is so-so and performance really doesn't seem to be priority. The company I work for has offered FF ESR but will be removing it from the platform within the year because of issues with stability. The one thing ESR is supposed to be good at... That leaves us with Edge or Chrome..

Back in 2010 FF had a +30% market share and in less than 5 years it was half. Now we are getting to sub 5%.. 10 years and the experience is the same: New release -> bugs -> troubleshoot -> working OK -> new release and repeat. Chrome as my back up browser is more or less: New release -> working OK
Unless Mozilla gets a move on, actually figures out who their target audience is and improves on the basics before prioritizing "bigger numbers are better" mindset it will completely die within a few years.

/rant