Opera's Desktop Browser Gets Built-In Tracking Protection (techcrunch.com) 30
Yesterday, Opera announced the launch of version 68 of its flagship desktop browser, bringing a tracker blocker that will make it harder for advertisers and others to track you while you browse the web. The company says it also has the additional benefit of speeding up page loads by up to 23%. TechCrunch reports: The new tracking protection feature is off by default (as is the existing ad blocker). The tracking feature uses the EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List, which has been around for quite a few years now. In addition to the new tracking protection, which is increasingly becoming standard among browser vendors (and which is surely putting some additional pressure on Google and its Chrome browser), Opera is also introducing a new screenshotting feature with this update. That's not an unusual feature, but it's a pretty full-featured implementation, with the ability to blur parts of a page and draw on the screenshots.
Monoculture (Score:2)
>"Yesterday, Opera announced the launch of version 68 of its flagship desktop browser"
Chrom*
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Chinese owned (Score:4, Informative)
The Chrome-based browser is 100% Chinese owned. The advertising business was spun off into a separate entity.
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The difference there is next to inconsequential. Google at least is the devil-you-know.
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Norwegian... Their corporate office is in Oslo, Norway. Where did you get Chinese?
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Firefox (Score:2)
Isn't Firefox doing this already? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/ [mozilla.org]
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Isn't Firefox doing this already? https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/06/04/firefox-now-available-with-enhanced-tracking-protection-by-default/ [mozilla.org]
Yep, so now you have more than one choice.
And Internet Explorer (LOL) (Score:2)
I'm always amused to see people talking about this "new" feature that the dreaded Microsoft Internet Explorer has had for... a decade or so? It was off by default but easy to enable. Without any configuration it just used heuristics (based on third-party requests across multiple sites), but it also supported both manual control (so you could whitelist trusted sources and blacklist things that hadn't tripped the heuristic threshold yet). You could also add subscriptions to services that would provide a list
honest question (Score:3)
why are browsers doing this?
instead of after-the-fact trying to "protect", why not have the client send only the absolute minimum information for the server to respond with the desired information and everything else randomized, null or otherwise invalid?
i go to a page to read a paragraph's worth of text and i am greeted with:
animated advertisements
cookies warnings that if i want to get rid of i have to spend time and effort to configure all of them
request for a newsletter
embedded social media buttons
in-browser notifications request
add shortcut to home screen request
location request (wtf?)
dozens of scripts
PLUS whatever else i forgot or i can not see
i miss the old web
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That's what they are doing. They access the page, and the page says "you also need all this stuff to display me properly". The tracking blocker filters out all the tracking stuff and just loads the rest.
You could just switch to text only mode and only fetch the HTML, but that would break the internet for most people. If it was what people wanted then Lynx would be a popular browser.
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You could just switch to text only mode and only fetch the HTML, but that would break the internet for most people.
Mostly because of all the sites where the page HTML doesn't contain the content, and it's written in later with Javascript...
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that can be circumvented by shadowing the javascript that the site provides.
whatever exists client-side can be mimicked, having only the benefit of the user, in focus.
hidden variable values can be picked out
no forced css, no forced font faces, no forced font *sizes*, no forced image viewers, no forced media, no notifications, no popups, no popunders, no custom onclick events. Everything should be in the absolute control of the user.
neither chrome nor firefox have taken any serious steps towards that directi
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User CSS handles some of that, User JS handles the rest. If that's really what you want. Just use your own JS to remove theirs, and do all that parsing stuff you want to do. I think you'll find that it's a big PITA to do it again and again for each site, though.
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what you suggest tries to hide data and code after it has been requested from the server and transferred to my client. In short, a half-assed solution if you allow me the language. The browser is still a massive piece of software and i'm adding more stuff to it.
what i'm after is minimal communication with the server and minimal effort on the client side.
harder, not impossible (Score:2)
...bringing a tracker blocker that will _make it harder_ for advertisers and others to track you while you browse the web.
Devil may care... (Score:2)
Great, I can have a browser that thwarts ad tracking. That is wholly Chinese owned and likely pipes the same info to an authoritarian state.
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That's very concerning! Can you post the evidence that Opera does that?
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All I really need is Netscape with TLS support. (Score:2)
Can I have that please?
Professional (Score:1)