Firefox 120 Ready With Global Privacy Control, WebAssembly GC On By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Firefox 120 Ready With Global Privacy Control, WebAssembly GC On By Default

Ahead of the official release announcement due out tomorrow, the Mozilla Firefox 120.0 release binaries are now available...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-120-Available

[pgeorgi]

"Support for the Global Privacy Control "Sec-GPC" request header for when a user does not consent to a website or service selling or sharing their personal information with third parties. Users can set this if so desired via the Privacy and Security area within preferences."

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/...eaders/Sec-GPC says "Otherwise, the header is not sent, which indicates that either the user has not made a decision or the user is okay with their information being shared with or sold to third parties."
Not sure if opt-out is really the way to approach this: How about "By June 2024, if the request doesn't contain "Sec-GPC: 0", there is no consent to selling or sharing data with third parties"?

[Danny3]

I wish they were starting to enable Wayland by default starting with this version!
As for:

- JavaScript support for the User Activation API.

WTF is this?
Please don't tell me that Google convinced them to let websites know if I'm active on a page or not!
If I'm switching to another tab or minimize the browser, it's my ob / business, not something that websites need to be informed about!

[uid313]

I wish they were starting to enable Wayland by default starting with this version!
As for:

WTF is this?
Please don't tell me that Google convinced them to let websites know if I'm active on a page or not!
If I'm switching to another tab or minimize the browser, it's my ob / business, not something that websites need to be informed about!

May I recommend NoScript, a web browser extension that lets you block JavaScript from certain domains, or let you block all JavaScript except those which you have whitelisted.

[varikonniemi]

I think it already is possible to tell if the tab is active. Remember twitter doing this few years ago and stopped video playback if tab was not active. Way to circumvent it was to leave tab active, but switch to another window to multitask.

[V1tol]

WebAssembly GC extension is now enabled by default and in turn opens up new languages like Dart and Kotlin to run on Firefox.

Ah yes, garbage collected JS is not enough, my CPU bought last year is too old, more bloat needed.

[Old Grouch]

What are the differences between 'Global Privacy Control' and 'Do Not Track', and why do those differences mean it will be more successful?

I genuinely don't know, and would appreciate a link or some pointers to where I can educate myself.

Thanks.

[Vorpal]

What are the differences between 'Global Privacy Control' and 'Do Not Track', and why do those differences mean it will be more successful?

I genuinely don't know, and would appreciate a link or some pointers to where I can educate myself.

Thanks.

Not much from what I can tell. In fact it has even worse chance: It is Firefox specific, non-standard.

Nothing like this would become widely accepted without EU making a law mandating it. Websites count on you being too lazy to disable all the cookie categories and just clicking on accept all. A global setting would just make it way too easy for you.

[cynic]

Ah yes, garbage collected JS is not enough, my CPU bought last year is too old, more bloat needed.

the only sane option to GC is Rust.
So, i think GC is good

(not that I don't like Rust, only, it is not always the better option)

[pgeorgi]

What are the differences between 'Global Privacy Control' and 'Do Not Track', and why do those differences mean it will be more successful?

I genuinely don't know, and would appreciate a link or some pointers to where I can educate myself.

Thanks.

From the MDN link I posted in comment #1, it seems that the "Global Privacy Control" is about third party sharing (or selling) of data, while "Do Not Track" is about, well, tracking. Those are very similar but not quite the same (sharing with third parties might be for non-tracking purposes, tracking could be done by the first party).

The other aspect is that Microsoft poisoned the well for DNT when they made it default-on in IE10 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not...ng_controversy). With that, website operators started claiming that "how are we supposed to know that it's a user intent? Let's track!!!1" Just using a new name might be enough to reset the clock on that, although recently there was finally a lawsuit where "we ignore DNT" had consequences (https://stackdiary.com/german-court-...track-signals/)