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YouTube borked when users enable Firefox anti-fingerprinting:
Firefox users have recently started to notice that YouTube does not display videos properly when they enable the browser's anti-fingerprinting technology for better privacy.
When the privacy.resistFingerprinting privacy feature is enabled in Firefox, the feature will make the browser more resistant to fingerprinting scripts.
As fingerprinting can be used to track a user between different properties and even sites, it is a common feature suggested in Firefox privacy hardening guides.
A recent change on YouTube, though, is causing videos to have display problems when this feature is enabled.
[...] BleepingComputer has been able to reproduce this issue in both Firefox 72 and the recently released Firefox 75, so this is not an issue caused by Mozilla.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @09:04AM (7 children)
Brave generally does a better job of anti-tracking and has no problem rendering videos.
I do not have a positive opinion of Mozilla. They claim to be privacy and user oriented yet set the default engine to Google (which, by the way, they get paid a massive amount by Google to do)? And they claim to be about user privacy and integrity yet chose to do that stupid forcible install of a 'Mr. Robot' ad into the browser itself? Meh.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by driverless on Friday April 17 2020, @11:08AM
And you've just answered your own (rhetorical) question right there. Mozilla gets nearly all its income from Google, so it always has to suck up to Google. So end result is you get a second-rate Chrome clone built on Google technology and tied to Google's surveillance infrastructure. May as well just use Chrome directly, or if you prefer Firefox as it used to be before Mozilla fscked it up, Waterfox or some equivalent, which is what I'm using.
And buy Alex Kontos a beer if you ever run into him. He does more to keep the Firefox dream alive than a 1000-person corporation.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by epitaxial on Friday April 17 2020, @02:55PM (2 children)
Brave just sounds sketchy in every possible way.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @04:57PM
There's a lot of misinformation about Brave.
Brave is fundamentally just a fork of Chromium with all the Google crap removed and a bunch of privacy first features (anti-fingerprinting, anti-tracking, auto HTTPS, disabling third party cookies, disabling scripts) all put into it and able to be toggled, per site, with two clicks. The ad replacement stuff is 100% opt-in. If you don't opt in you're basically using Chrome that's faster and has a bunch of native privacy stuff. If you do opt in then you get paid (in a crypto) to occasionally view some ads that you can use to do things like 'tip' sites you like. Personally I do not opt into the ad stuff, because I think consumerism is a horrible both on a social and individual level.
You can replicate some of the functionality using plugins in other browsers, but then you have the various issues with plugins + plugin compatibility. So for instance Google just castrated many plugin based ad-blockers that use Chrome with their recent changes with Manifest V3. AdBlock was (is?) selling the ability for some sites to get white listed, and so on. *Those* sort of things are what I'd call sketchy!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 17 2020, @09:15PM
You're just not Brave enough to try it.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Friday April 17 2020, @04:40PM (1 child)
To play devil's advocate for a moment, let's divide users into two groups: those who care about privacy, and those who care more about convenience.
Those who care about privacy will take steps to remove themselves from Google's influence. They may be annoyed about changing the default search engine, but they will do it.
Those who care more about convenience won't care. They want the best search results. And the fact is that Google has the best search results. Not only that, but they have the name recognition. Convenience users want Google.
But convenience users probably don't care enough to switch their search engine. That sounds complicated if you're not already used to tinkering with browser settings, which they are not.
So what are the convenience users going to do if Firefox defaults to, say, DuckDuckGo? Are they going to accept this thing they've never heard of, that their friends have never heard of, and which seems to give them less valuable search results than they get on other devices that use Google search?
No. They're going to uninstall Firefox and switch to Chrome.
--
tl;dr:
- The users who care a lot about privacy will switch their search engine. They're not going back to Chrome.
- The users who don't care about privacy may not accept a search engine that isn't Google. They are likely to go back to Chrome if Google isn't the default search engine
Unless Firefox is outflanked by an even more privacy-protecting browser, they're going to have the most users by making Google their default search engine. The fact that they get paid for it is only a conflict of interest if it becomes the most important factor in that decision, and I'm not convinced it is.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 17 2020, @05:10PM
DuckDuckGo used to suck. Now, in my opinion, it is better than Google. Of course that's debatable but there's no doubt that if you gave the average user a list of results from Google and another list of results from DuckDuckGo, almost nobody would be able to determine which is which. Try it!
I don't really know who uses Firefox anymore. Their marketshare has fallen off a cliff over the past few years, and I think that's largely because of these sort of stupid decisions. They're a non-profit company that's run like a for-profit company willing to sacrifice every value that they might have ever held to get next quarter's revenue up. It's nonsensical.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zeigerpuppy on Friday April 17 2020, @10:03PM
Please, if you care about internet standards, privacy and user freedom, use and support Firefox/Mozilla in any wya you can!
Mozilla is not perfect as a company, but we have a very dangerous situation right now.
There are really only two code bases that are viable browsers into the future, the Firefox code base and the Chrom(ium) code base.
Google desperately wants Total Data Control (TM) and it sees Chrome as it's vehicle for this. Chromium is nice but it's really not independent from Google's influence and we'd see an even more rapid erosion of web standards and privacy if Firefox wasn't holding the line on standards.
So if you want a healthy iternet, one of the most important things is to support Firefox. If you haven't used it for a while, try it again, it's gotten a lot faster over the last year. Even better, if you'd like Mozilla to be independent from Google search revenue, send them a donation!