It'd be cool if browsers didn't come with all this "to prevent finger printing we've made it impossible to do things with precision" bullshit. Here's an idea: instead, you make adblocking, script blocking, and third party domain blocking just part of "this is what a browser is supposed to let you control out of the box".
It's almost like someone should make a new browser based on you owning your browsing experience, not funded or owned by people who benefit from sabotaging your experience.
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I should also point out that "a browser" and "the render engine" are completely different things, and you could even make a great browser on top of chromium. It's just not going to make you, or anyone, money.
Remember Linux? Imagine if someone had gone "well the only way for this to make money is to run ads and have it sell your data by just randomly sending it off to data brokers".
(And yeah, that's literally what Windows does these days, I hope you remembered to gpedit)
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@TheRealPomax it's almost like the one browser engine that everyone uses is developed by a company that makes insane revenue from selling targeted ads...
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@nomisiv and that's drastically underselling exactly how vertically integrated it is.
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@TheRealPomax I concur.
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@TheRealPomax I think there is a hard problem here even if the browser provider was perfectly aligned with the computer owner. You're still using this program to access an eco-system of variable hostility. Website A serves an image just so you can see it, website B serves a tracking pixel. In the face of this even something as aligned as Gemini just gave up on images altogether "to protect your privacy".
The hard choice: speak out or hide when anyone might hear you in the dark forest.
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@akkartik absolutely. But the nice thing about problems that exist either way is that they don't matter: those are inherent problems that don't contribute to or detract from how we decide to move forward.
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@TheRealPomax I don't quite follow. In this example of images, what does your line of reasoning recommend? Do you want to be able to load images (do things with precision) no matter the privacy cost? Or do you want to follow Gemini and never load images automatically? Or some third choice?
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@TheRealPomax Oh, you want more fine-grained control over images? Maybe a page shows shadows and you can click on each to load inline? Or policies for specific websites that are allowed to implicitly load?
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@akkartik step back: what is the privacy cost? Is it big enough to need laws? Good news, we have those. First party profiling and tracking is already covered, and third party blocking (and yes, that would including not loading a hot-linked image by default, let's get back to seeing broken image links on pages, that was a powerful signal on the old web) should be a given.
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@TheRealPomax I don’t follow this at all. How would a browser prevent fingerprinting from websites if not by limiting the precision of APIs?
Anyone can make a website that does any kind of nefarious thing with web APIs. If a browser opened up those APIs, how would the browser maintain the user’s privacy?
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@doctype_jon it wouldn't, that's the whole point. Instead of locking everything down, make it super obvious when it happens instead, so that users can make an informed decision on whether to allow it or not.
And if that's not how you want to interact with your browser, due to privacy concerns, then obviously don't use my fictional browser.
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@TheRealPomax this is what I’m confused about. How would this fictional browser make it super obvious when fingerprinting happens?
How does it know when it happened?
Is it going to have a database of every known way to fingerprint and update that database constantly as people find new approaches?
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@doctype_jon It's going to tell you that the website you're currently on is trying to do X and whether you're okay with that.
"That'll be a shit experience!" yep, it'll be a shit experience the first time you visit a website you want to visit again in the future and so you set what you consider acceptable permissions and move on with your life. Does this random site you clicked through from Mastodon want to load third-party images? Tough luck, those are broken image links until you allow them
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@TheRealPomax Ahh ok so the idea is no web APIs are available without a permission prompt.
IIRC this approach was considered before choosing to make the API less precise. I might be imagining this but I think the consensus was that they felt the user of the browser wouldn’t understand the trade off between features and privacy or would be forced to choose between their privacy and not using a website.
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@doctype_jon As far as I remember, the reasoning was along the line of "normal people want X" and by the time the decision was made, pointing out "okay but normal people use Chrome or Safari instead, the whole reason they use a privacy-oriented browser is because they want control" it was already way too late.
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