firefox

Firefox and web privacy

Web Browsers

We all know that we are being tracked on the internet when we are browsing, but we are unable to do much about it.

Many advertisers will use tracking cookies to create "fingerprints" of users in order to create advertising profiles. There may be others using the same methods to track users for more malevolent reasons.

One ironic side of preventing such "fingerprints" is that deleting them also leaves a trail - just like a black hole is observed by its effects on other things, a user may potentially also be tracked by the lack of certain types of fingerprints and different users are able to eliminate different finger prints, each user is once against trackable by their unique combination of fingerprint and lack of fingerprint.

Firefox 3.6

Just upgraded to the release candidate. and so far things are good.

Scrolling is a little faster, which is throwing me slightly - maybe it is too fast for me?

The layout etc is the same and one behavioural change by default is to open new tabs next to the tab from within which the link was clicked instead of at the end.

Clicking links on the bookmarks bar will still open the tab at the end, but links inside the page will open next to the current tab. This feature may take me some time to get used to as the grouping of tabs has no visual indications unlike in Internet Explorer 8 and I also have to fight my muscle memory.