I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".
No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.
I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.
Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.
It is not unfair, it’s the crux of “consent”. Consent does not mean “keep pestering until they give in”. When technology does not respect user consent by presenting them a false dichotomy of “yes or later”, that is bad. Not all ads do this, but many dark patterns do, it’s even built into the OS like in iOS and Windows.
The irony is that there are folks that think, in earnest, that seeing an ad and rape are comparable. Wait. Nope. It's not irony, but that speaks volumes about how me too came about.
Nobody is saying ads are just as bad as rape. At least what I’m saying is that the repeated “yes or not-now until you cave in” design anti pattern is bad for the same reason as other things that don’t respect consent are bad. Because consent is important.
Let me be clear, if you implement these as a dev, you are doing a bad thing. No it’s not as bad as rape. Is it comparable? Yes, because it’s bad for the same reason as rape is (violating consent), just obviously at a different magnitude.
I didn't consent to you replying to my comment. Should we compare the ways in which you're like a rapist? Should we call you a killer because you've killed a mosquito (an animal that serves no environmental purpose)? No, because your entire premise is absurd on its face.
You explicitly consented to the ads you dislike when you installed Firefox – Mozilla has been putting ads in Firefox in one form or another since at least 2015 and they've been very transparent about the whole thing. You can revoke your consent without penalty or lasting damage any time by uninstalling Firefox. You cannot do that with rape. You cannot uninstall rape and you cannot undo rape. These ads are not in any way comparable to rape.
Let me give you an example. Someone I know was raped in 2010. She never came forward to the police, but three other women, none of whom knew each other, did come forward to SFPD. Two of the three didn't even speak English. Despite all four of these women telling virtually identical stories all of the charges were dropped. How's that work? Turns out that without their knowing (and thus without their consent) this guy recorded everything including the initial implied consent. That all four of these women revoked their consent when things got way out of hand was ignored by the rapist and the court. No charges (e.g. illegal wiretapping) were ever brought against the rapist for illegally recording these women.
The woman I knew? She tried to kill herself shortly after. If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of women that have either attempted or succeeded in killing themselves as a result of rape. Go survey Firefox users and see how many have attempted suicide due to the harm these "non-consensual" ads caused. I'll wait.
You don't own the comment as in the replyable entity. That's part of HN. You explicitly chose to look at replies. There aren't even reply notifications here.
Since it's too late to edit my other reply, I forgot to qualify this sentence:
If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of
women that have either attempted or succeeded in killing themselves as a
result of rape.
The correctly qualified sentence should be:
If I look back to 2010 I'd need more than one hand to count the number of
women *that I know* that have either attempted or succeeded in killing
themselves as a result of rape.
Coincidentally, there was the recent TV show, Anatomy of a Scandal, about a fictional rape case where the defense tried to argue that “not now” wasn’t sufficient to withdraw consent for sex.
Yep. Specifically, the temporary containers keep me there for web dev stuff. People will always recommend profiles in chrome, but that can't replace a single hotkey to spawn a temporary throwaway container.
I can have 3+ different temporary containers open at once, each with a distinct set of cookies, whereas private browsing gives me only one extra cookie jar.
It's massively helpful for testing interactions between users.
To be a little more explicit, I think you need to spawn a private window from a non-private window to get a new environment. If you do it from another private window it uses the same sandbox.
Not that I've been able to find. Brave would be the obvious candidate to implement this, but the impression I get is that they're not all that interested.
I've been using Brave for awhile and I'm pretty happy with it. There is the shady crypto thing, and the shady VPN thing, and the dubious Tor thing, and I don't really trust them, but I can't really say any of that affects the browsing experience.
I'm not sure about their user experience either. The website for it has zero concrete information and you can't even see that there is no windows support until you give it an email address.
Are they private by default or do you need to make adjustments to the settings to it? So far Brave seems to be the most private popular browser out-of-box.
No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.
I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.
Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.