Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I've never liked the Chrome browser, personally, for two reasons. It had an auto-update that at the time that I learned about it you couldn't disable, and it eats an awful lot of resources. And I don't use it except on a couple of PCs at work, not on my personal work station.

So let me give you a little background on how cookies can track you across web sites.

First off, don't go thinking that Google is mainly a search engine company. They are an advertising company. They make their money off of selling (functionally) ad space to companies through search results and looking at key words in your email. NEVER FORGET THIS. It used to be this was accomplished by what is known as third-party cookies. This was a special kind of cookie that could persist across web sites and browser sessions.

For example, you buy a pair of shoes off of Amazon. Amazon keeps a cookie (or three) in your browser's cookie cache that remembers some information about you, and theoretically no one except Amazon can read that information. So we have an Amazon.com cookie. Now, a super cookie is just a cookie with the name .Com and that's it. And because it's a top-level domain (TLD), apparently it can read some information below it, such as the Amazon.com cookie. It may not know what the information within the Amazon.com cookies means, but it knows the information is there and might be able to make some guesses.

Advertisers want as much information about people as they can get, supercookies are one such tool. Another tool is tracking pixels. These are invisible 1 pixel images that are inserted into a page or email that link to a server where the tracking pixel has a specific identity tied to the email or page that you open. If your email or web page doesn't block images or tracking pixels, when you open the page, that pixel is loaded - and the tracker database knows that specific pixel was loaded and ties that page or your email into tracking information about you.

Now, email programs can be configured to block tracking pixels and supercookies, which advertisers hate because they get less analytic information which means less information they can sell to potential ad or analytics buyers. And remember, Google is in the ad serving business.

Google came up with an alternative, baked into the browser that they want everyone to use. When you open Gmail, or Google Search, in Firefox or Microsoft Edge or Safari, you get this lovely popup: For the best experience, open this page in Google Chrome. Gee, wonder why! Now what Google is doing is they analyze the page that your browser is now looking at and generates a 'topic list', along with a unique identifier for your PC, and now they have analytics that they can sell for ad buyers! All without cookies! Oh, and it gets better! Google claims "a significant step on the path towards a fundamentally more private web."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

They also claim that they'll block third-party cookies in the second half of 2024. I think Firefox now does that by default. And while Microsoft Edge, which is a pretty good browser, is built on Chrome code, it can also block third-party cookies.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

Some or all extensions are being disabled. You get a warning, but re-installing the program doesn't make it work again. This is a known bug, and a ticket has been submitted. It will get fixed, but it will require a patch to be issued, i.e. a new release of Firefox, so we're just going to have to wait for it to be fixed.

It's a bit of an overstatement to say ALL Firefox extensions are breaking, but a lot are. My main one is Adblock+, and it's just fine.

In the words of the Bard, shit happens.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/03/a-glitch-is-breaking-all-firefox-extensions/

The latest update became available recently. I upgraded it on my iMac, put my computer to sleep, came back, and my browser was gone. I thought maybe I'd shut it down to do a Flash update or something, so I restarted it and resumed reading stuff. And a little later it crashed again. Restarted, resumed doing stuff, it crashed again.

All told, it crashed three times in about half an hour. So I went to the Firefox site and found the previous stable release, R28, and have been happily ever after.

So you might want to wait for 31 before updating it.

and you can participate, regardless of where you are in the world.

Mozilla is going to be releasing Firefox 3.0, and they're going to try to set a world record for the most bytes downloaded for a single program in a single day. Myself, I'll download it, but I'll probably wait a couple of weeks to install it to give them time to discover any really big showstopper bugs that might have escaped the beta process.

You can pledge at http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/, I'm actually going to download it twice, maybe three times: my Mac laptop, my PC at work, and perhaps my Thinkpad.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/