Firefox asks for testers of new browser supercharger, Context Graph

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They’d like you to sign up, but your activity will be tracked. It’s 100% opt-in. Interesting concept – improve Firefox’s ability to anticipate which p
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well woody looks like Mozilla is also into “telemetry” stuff so Microsoft isn’t alone in that sort of thing with Win10.

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Well, yes, except Mozilla is very up front about it – and it’s all opt-in.

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At first (and second) glance, I can’t say I’m interested in letting someone (or something) else “anticipate” which web pages I am going to want to load.

However, their being up-front about what info they are gathering, and this being 100% opt-in, causes me to take a third glance at it.

The fact that so many people and processes try to spy on my web activity causes me to likely not sign up to be a tester for this.

Speaking of spying, last night I went to Walmart.com to look at some products. I am running NoScript (with Firefox). The site wasn’t showing me stuff, and so I knew that it wanted a script to run which was being blocked. (The only scripts permitted to run were Walmart-related.) I looked at the scripts it was trying to run — all of them were either Google-related scripts or some other spying-related scripts.

On just about all other shopping websites, I can get the site to work by just enabling scripts from that site. But not Walmart.com. So I’ll probably shop somewhere other than Walmart.com in the future.

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At least they’re asking for an opt in rather than the oppressive MS approach of we’ll ram it down your throat.

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>So I’ll probably shop somewhere other than
>Walmart.com in the future.

Hear hear!

Bravo to you for taking a stand!

So many opt in, when it comes to their own needs, ignoring the problem of web operators trying to squeeze them for everything possible that it’s getting to the point of “death from 1000 cuts”.

I’ll bet most people don’t realize that at many web sites the majority of the traffic (and scripts and running programs) is NOT involved with the content they’re visiting the site to get.

Something for everyone to consider:

“It needs to be acceptable to me or I go elsewhere”.

THAT’s what makes commerce work.

-Noel

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“improve Firefox’s ability to anticipate which pages may help you.”

All this “help” is creating a nation of mind-rotted people who cannot do simple research and make an informed decision.

Hi! This is Siri, Alexa, Mozzlla, etc., telling you it is bedtime so take your soma like a good little spoon-fed automaton and dream sweetly…

Sad.

The smarter the device, the stupider the average user.

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and will the pages it anticipates may help be ones that it gets paid to promote I wonder !

No thanks, I don’t want any sort of pre-fetch, I’m quite capable of deciding for myself. I’m on a capped internet limit, what if it decides a video maybe of help and starts caching a dirty great file.

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Can’t say that anything which tries to predict where I want to go on the Internet has ever been more than 25% right for me. Maybe I’m weird, but those “predictive results” only slow me down.

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Woody, do you have a preference Google or Yahoo when searching in Firefox?

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Search in Firefox – definitely duckduckgo.com.

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Thank you Woody. I never tried duckduckgo, but I will as per your suggestion.

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@Woody:

I use duckduckgo.com in Firefox as well. I only recently changed from Bing, and sometimes Google.

I’m finding duckduckgo to be excellent!! 🙂

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What irritates the $#@! out of me is that Firefox asks if I want to “try something new” about every other time I open the browser (or so it seems). There’s not a “no not ever” button, just an “x” and I click it and it closes and then a few browser opens later, it pops up again like some blasted spammer that somehow avoids your anti-spam controls. When I say NO, I mean NO!

Google does this constantly with every freaking thing you can imagine (want to try Chrome? Want to try Google Mail? Want to make Google your default start page even when it already is, but not in the way it expects so it keeps asking constantly??? We need new anti-spam laws against the app makers it seems….

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I tried DuckDuckGo after hearing about it for the first time here. Not quite at the same standard with Google.

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True. I still use Google for searches, only occasionally drifting into Bing. But if I’m searching for something I don’t want the big guys to know about – medical ailments, for example – I’ll switch to DuckDuckGo. My ISP will still have records of the sites I went to, but that’s a lesser exposure, I think.

And I always have a VPN handy, for torrents. 🙂

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For the second or third time I have a “want to try something new” notification show up at the top of the screen in Firefox. I clicked the “x” but it came back like undead. How do I permanently disable this audacious annoyance? I have “never check for updates” set in the options/preferences.

There’s something basically wrong with a piece of software automatically sending you unasked-for messages from home base, particularly when you disable auto-updates and auto-notification settings.

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That’s odd. Is it an ad for a different browser?

By any chance are you seeing it while on the msn.com web site?

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I don’t know. Good question!

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