Chris Beard Confirmed As Mozilla's CEO

[bison]

We thought about Hans Reiser, but it turns out gay bashers are right up there with murderers. I guess we'll have to settle for someone respecting the law and isn't a homophobic prick.

Enough of the straight-bashing hate speech! Brendan Eich is a good man; Mozilla made an egregious tactical error when they let him go.

[Luke]

Anandtech adblock detecting code no obvious effect with NoScript and Ghostery

Ah well if they do it doesn't effect ghostery or adblock plus in chromium or firefox.

In FF I got no surprising behavior from anandtech.com with my default browser setup of Ghostery and NoScript with all blocking on by default. That does not mean they are not detecting anything, could mean they don't do anything with the information when you are just reading the front page. If I were a regular user of that site, the most important thing for me to block would not be their ads, it would be Facebook, which I refuse to connect to or interact with for privacy reasons and in fact block in /etc/hosts for link and sharing button protection.

A lot of sites like Vimeo appear to work fine on a blocking setup but will do "mysterious" things like refusing to form accounts (for video upload in Vimeo's case), I have always assumed that meant they detect ad or tracker blocking, I simply go elsewhere and ignore such sites. Vimeo does not say why on the landing page that results they turn off account formation, they simply make it appear that "account formation has been disabled at this time," presumably to make it harder for someone who wants to force them to cooperate to debug the situation. When I tested them in 2010 and encountered that, I simply moved on. I now prefer Archive.org for video hosting, they are not ad supported at all, use no 3ed party javascript, and I can deal openly with them on terms I prefer. This has the further advantage of protecting my viewers if they are using non-blocking browsers.

I hear that it's not that uncommon for sites to turn off bandwidth or CPU intensive stuff for non ad-permitting users while keeping basic functionality available. This of course requires detecting that ads or tracking are blocked to work if JS is enabled but ads are not. Commercial news sites usually have a very complex set of 3ed party trackers and adservers,very few of them will play their videos on my machines no matter what you whitelist, I generally treat them as not offering video and leave it at that. I value my privacy more than I value their video.

A commercial site could invert the usual scenario by setting an empty box where a video or whatever would be announcing "bonus content for ad-enabling viewers," and letting people decide for themselves what they want to do with no claims of moral arguments, etc.

[Krysto]

There's this and the fact that only 3 browsers actually work on the modern web: Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. All alternative browsers are incompatible with the modern web for various reasons, and so other browsers that actually tab properly can't be used, Qupzilla for example.

You're kidding. IE is incompatible with tons of new stuff...WebGL, WebRTC, and so on.

[smitty3268]

You're kidding. IE is incompatible with tons of new stuff...WebGL, WebRTC, and so on.

IE supports WebGL.

[Luke_Wolf]

You're kidding. IE is incompatible with tons of new stuff...WebGL, WebRTC, and so on.

You mean the Web Browser as an OS crap? sorry I don't use or care about any of that. If I want games I have plenty of them offline and they're better than anything you're going to find running through WebGL, and if I want to do a voice chat I've got Steam, Skype, XMPP + libjingle, SIP, etc...