New Chrome Beta Adds Privacy Controls, Translation Option 181
billandad writes "Anyone would think the timing was deliberate; just as Microsoft is forced into giving users the option to switch from IE via the browser ballot screen, so Google introduces a new Chrome beta with enhanced privacy features to chisel away at Microsoft's market share. '... you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites.' The new beta also adds language detection, and will prompt the user to translate a page if it's written in a foreign tongue."
A bright future for the web... (Score:5, Informative)
And Opera 10.50 has just been released [pcworld.com] too, the first version of Opera with <Video> tag support.
With Chrome, Safari and Firefox all evolving quickly, the future of the web is looking good. I just wish they would all support an open, royalty-free codec.
Re:A bright future for the web... (Score:4, Insightful)
At least IE8 is better than its predecessors and IE9 looks even better, but still..
Re:A bright future for the web... (Score:5, Insightful)
Netscape also had the largest userbase when they lost.
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Microsoft had already surpassed [uiuc.edu] Netscape by the time they cancelled Netscape Navigator 5 in favour of a complete rewrite. IE had 50.4% and NN had 46.9%. Microsoft had only just overtaken Netscape one month before the decision to do the rewrite was made - which must surely have been a deciding factor.
Re:A bright future for the web... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:A bright future for the web... (Score:4, Interesting)
Video tag is such a mess currently that I'm not surprised if they didn't spend much of their energy on it. Also, if they did, it means they'll side with Apple and Google to H.264's side. This leaves Firefox and Opera alone with Theora. It's not that IE9 isn't up to par with video tag support, it's that video tag itself is far from ready. We will still be using Flash for a long time.
If I remember correctly, they do have canvas support and improved javascript performance though, and most importantly, they're going for standards compliance.
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It was never the fact that MS implemented non-standardized tags or specs.. it's that they did so and then stopped! They let IE6 stand with little more than security fixes for nearly a decade.
I applaud any browser maker that pushes the web forward - but do so knowing that you will likely be revising your implementation as standards are approved and adopted. This is why so much of CSS3+ implementation starts as mozilla-css-supported-thing-here and webkit-css-thing-there. Developers can choose to implement or
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ask a person who admins windows machines what causes them the most headache
IE.
Actually IE is the most easiest one to customize and deploy in organizations with hundreds of workstations. Microsoft understands how business environments work and have ensured the sys admins have good tools available for deployment, group policies, organization-wide settings and other things only needed in organizations. Other browsers completely miss that and are mostly suited towards home users.
Re:A bright future for the web... (Score:5, Insightful)
while IE doesn't generate direct revenue. The main reason why they are spending resources on IE is to promote Bing and a number of other products.
So, just like Firefox, Chrome and Opera then?
It doesn't really matter if browsers don't generate direct revenue. Indirect revenue is still revenue just as well. Mozilla cashes in $78.6 million (2008) a year, and they don't even have the marketshare of IE and that was in 2008.
Re:A bright future for the web... (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad Opera won't be part of that since literally no one uses it.
You don't know what 'literally' means, do you?
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He meant literally in the figurative sense.
Choices (Score:4, Insightful)
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Coming along so well?
They haven't even implemented simple things such as a bookmark manager or extensions on a Mac yet. It has a looong way to go.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Interesting)
They haven't even implemented simple things such as a bookmark manager or extensions on a Mac yet. It has a looong way to go.
Extensions work on the Mac beta version. I don't use bookmarks, so can't comment on that.
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Google. I either know the domain by heart, or I just google it.
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Over the last 18 years or so I have taken some pains to maintain a logical and useful bookmarks file, but I've approached a limit. I can foresee a time in the not too distant future when I will stop bothering to manage or even keep bookmarks at all. The drawback to this is that Google has that much more
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They haven't even implemented simple things such as a bookmark manager or extensions on a Mac yet. It has a looong way to go.
This once was true but not anymore. The current Mac version of Google Chrome does indeed support extensions and has the bookmark manager.
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I'm still looking for another feature.. (Score:2, Interesting)
..where some websites have allowed cookies that don't get deleted on browser exit [firefox]
I have the clearing history enabled (for cookies and logins only), but every time not only the "untrusted cookies" are deleted, but also the "trusted" ones. Default rule is to store cookies until I close Firefox.
I searched for extensions, but no luck.
A whitelist based on some cookies criteria (regexp or such) would be the icing on the cake.
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Grandparent post (not me) wants to mark some cookies as "Trusted" (for instance, because they keep specific sessions open that -must- be kept open for one or another purpose), and then delete the rest regularly on exit. Yeah, I'd like that too. On the other hand, I'm not good enough at programming to come close to implementing such myself, so I can study for another two years, or I can ask for help.
Will we ever have control over flash cookies? (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems no browser offers the functionality to wipe those out, and yet they can contain malicious code (there was a recent infection at the office).
*praying for the demise of flash*
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Having an HD display, I can't read anything in that settings thingie and it's not sizable either, just like lots of sites, IOW unusable.
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Flash settings on high-DPI displays (Score:2)
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You can set the flash settings here [macromedia.com] for any browser.
I put my flash settings to paranoid mode using that thingy, and since then, even though I have reset the settings to the default values, re-installed flash, removed all flash-related files from my system, and basically did all I could to ensure a clean start, flash still works only partially in this browser (firefox on linux) because all the flash cookies are rejected. I would advise everyone to stay away from the adobe-provided settings and instead install the firefox betterprivacy plugin, setting it to d
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It seems no browser offers the functionality to wipe those out, and yet they can contain malicious code (there was a recent infection at the office).
You might be interested in the BetterPrivacy plugin [mozilla.org] for Firefox.
Privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm guessing that the "enhanced privacy features" doesn't yet extend to being able to turn off the RLZ identifier [wikipedia.org]?
(Good job we have SRWare Iron [srware.net] instead)
Re:Privacy (Score:4, Interesting)
Iron was created by a person who's admitted that he's spreading FUD about Google just to drive traffic to his site so he can make money off his ads. Is that the kind of project you want to cheer for?
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You protesting people who do the right thing for the wrong reasons? Do you cheer or protest people who do the wrong things for the right reason?
Or are you so noble that you can only cheer for people who do the right things for the right reasons? If so, you must be awfully lonely sitting on top that ivory tower.
Personally, I'd root the guy on to continue development of this product and change his reasoning later. Otherwise you'll end up with no development and another broke developer.
I've never heard of Iron
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He refuses to submit bug reports or patches back to Chromium, because he is not interested in actually improving it, just in promoting his own fork. The Chromium devs are most definitely interested in fixing any possible privacy issues, and in fact Chromium does pretty much everything Iron does, without having to trust some shady guy on the internet.
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The number of times you've posted about Iron in this thread makes me think you are the one spreading FUD.
rlz demystified (Score:2)
Check out
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/google-chrome-privacy-whitepaper.pdf [google.com]
It says
"Promotional tags and tokens
Installations of Google Chrome that are obtained from promotional campaigns send information regarding
the effectiveness of the campaigns to Google. Installations of Google Chrome obtained by directly visiting
www.google.com/chrome do not send this information.
This information is required for compliance with contractual obligations where Google must accurately
measure the effectiveness o
And still no real adblock support (Score:2)
Security changes won't make me switch (Score:3, Interesting)
Security features are nice, but they aren't a selling point. I won't change browsers to prevent tracking cookies. I don't know that much about javascript, and I don't mind most of the ads that I see. Ad block plus has been doing just fine with the pop-ups, and I don't care about those other things.
Translating foreign pages? That is interesting. I run into a fair amount of Chinese datasheets.
Just give me the web page as fast as possible, and keep my videos as smooth as possible. After that, I don't really care.
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They may not be a selling point for you, but they are for some other people. You wouldn't want the content of your bank account transparently transferred to some criminal's bank account by some malicious JavaScript running due to an XSS attack on your bank's web site. Just to give an example what JavaScript can do.
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I have gotten 2 separate messages from two different banks/credit card agencies saying they have had a security breach and my information may have been stolen. I simply don't believe that there is anything that I can do to protect myself from this kind of theft, so I just assume that I will get robbed at some point.
No matter what I do, I have a high risk of being screwed by some company that is storing my information, or some disgruntled employee grabbing my information from an apartment/car/internet/cell p
Interface (Score:2)
The main reason I use Chrome is because of the excellent interface. When maximized, the tabs push right against the screen edge. I've not seen any app that makes such efficient usage of screen real estate. I've tried to configure FireFox, using TinyMenu to reduce the amount of white space. But it's still not as efficient.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding... (Score:2)
Again, not having used Chrome (on Linux), maybe I'm misunderstanding.
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It's not just when maximized. The general Chrome interface is very compact, having the menu bar done away with. When using Firefox, I install the Classic Compact [mozilla.org] extension, which is an improvement. But designwise, it doesn't look as polished as the default Chrome or Firefox theme.
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The main reason I use Chrome is because of the excellent interface. When maximized, the tabs push right against the screen edge. I've not seen any app that makes such efficient usage of screen real estate. I've tried to configure FireFox, using TinyMenu to reduce the amount of white space. But it's still not as efficient.
Chrome had set a new trend for browser UIs. For example, the just-released Opera 10.50, out of the box, largely copies Chrome UI [techtree.com] in default configuration, complete with tabs-in-title-bar. I suspect Firefox will follow suit eventually.
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Great tip, thanks.
The features I want (Score:2)
Add an option to make it look like every other window i've got. Maybe some people like the round-cornered title bar-less window, but i find it annoying. Not only is it aesthetically annoying to have it so different from everything else, but i often have trouble finding it amidst all the other windows i've got open because i mentally locate everything by the title bar. I often have
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You're complaining about Chrome having an inconsistent UI? On a Microsoft [newgnu.net] OS?
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Uh, yes. I am. I'm using XP and Chrome is the only program i have open right now or that i use on a regular basis that doesn't have a perfectly rectangular window with a title bar.
Did you have any other questions?
Now if they would just... (Score:2)
Updates (Score:3, Informative)
Does it also allow for control over Auto Updates? [robmensching.com]
Between you and me... (Score:2)
I'd rather that they work on some fundamental usability issues - like returning to the same point in a long page when you perform a back action.
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
You don't have to "trust" their browser at all.
The source code [chromium.org] for Chrome is freely available. If you find any features that are unfriendly towards privacy, you're free to modify the source.
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the usual trick. The privacy settings conveniently ignore any such issue and only concentrate on the client side things like "private tab" or cookie handling. Of course, if you don't want to go completely white-list based (and most users don't), there's no way to explicitly block certain domains like google-analytics.com.
Of course it's convenient for Google to call only that privacy and completely ignore the fact that every Chrome installation has identifier about where you downloaded it, when you installed it, an unique identifier, everything you type to browser bar is sent to Google, any domain you visit is sent to Google, and so on...
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That's hardly a new thing in software. Think of license keys! The ID is used to accurately count installs and nothing more.
In the Chrome I'm running that can all be switched off by pressing wrench -> options -
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Within Chrome. Of course you can use some 3rd party apps, but that's not an excuse not to have it.
Also just FYI, Ad blockers on Chrome don't stop the http requests being made, they just hide ads. It's useless for blocking data gathering services because your info is still being sent.
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Hidden in plain sight (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to "trust" their browser at all. The source code for Chrome is freely available. If you find any features that are unfriendly towards privacy, you're free to modify the source.
If - and only if - you can read and understand the source.
If - and only if - you have the programming skills - and the time - to produce a well-behaved modification.
I am tempted to argue that when a program reaches a certain size or complexity the difference between closed and open source becomes academic.
Re:Hidden in plain sight (Score:4, Interesting)
You haven't read all the source code of Firefox I suppose?
Re:Hidden in plain sight (Score:4, Informative)
Or: if you can have someone do it for you. See SRWare Iron.
Re:Hidden in plain sight (Score:4, Interesting)
Iron is basically a scam by some guy who bashes Google to drive more traffic to his Google Ads. Don't encourage an asshole by using his browser.
(And why on earth would you trust some random guy on the internet in the first place?)
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Yes, I remember well when the guy who does Iron showed /.)
up on the chromium mailing list. When I suggested
he submit patches to fix the privacy problems, he came
right out and said he didn't want to because he was
planning on making money by scaring users into using Iron.
(I think I saw the chat logs posted not long ago to
He seemed quite cynical about it; I wouldn't trust the guy myself.
If you know of a privacy problem with Chrome's latest
dev channel release, please post a bug to the chromium bug tracker.
See
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Iron is basically a scam by some guy who bashes Google to drive more traffic to his Google Ads. Don't encourage an asshole by using his browser.
(And why on earth would you trust some random guy on the internet in the first place?)
The guy behind the Slashdot account Goaway is a murderer, and he has raped animals on multiple occasions, just to drive people to his animal porn site. Don't encourage this piece of shit by replying to his posts.
(And why on earth would you trust some random guy on the internet in the first place?)
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Iron isn't just a "scam." It's Chrome with
#1 means it's a headache to deploy on a workstation image.
#2 is mostly an annoyance, but especially so on "frozen" workstations that preserve their state. (Download and install the same update indefinitely until the image is updated, along with Java and Adobe and iTunes and EVERYTHING ELSE...)
#3 I honestly don't care about enou
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If you want to remove the Google stuff, you can already get Chromium. You don't need Iron for that, and you're definitely taking a much bigger risk trusting some shady guy on the internet over trusting the Chromium team.
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There is something to be said for not having to compile your own code. Especially since I'd have to download a gigabyte of patches and additional SDKs to do it in Visual Studio 2008, as well as integrate some special add-ons I'd rather not have in my IDE.
Which still doesn't get me a deployable installer.
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http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/ [chromium.org]
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What surprises me is that there are no community builds of Chrome with the tracking removed.
An exciting new browser with some very cool tech (one thread per tab, super fast Javascript) and no-one except Google and a scammer builds it. There are several alternate builds of Firefox and that's much more of a pain to compile (at least for Windows), let alone modify.
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That's what Chromium is, and it most definitely exists.
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If someone takes an open source project and removes some components for privacy concerns,
And refuses to file any bugs or submit any patches back to the original project, because he is not actually interested in improving that, but just in promoting his own fork for monetary reasons?
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You fork his fork.
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Because unlike with Chrome he is offering the modified browser's source code of Iron as well, so you can check for yourself and compile. Browse the forums, is anyone voicing privacy concerns there regarding this fork?
As a big source code dump. He's not submitting any patches back to Chromium, who would be very interested in them, or filing any bugs, because he is only interested in making money off his own fork.
Chromium already does pretty much everything sane that Iron does. There's no need to feed an open source leech by using it.
Re:Hidden in plain sight (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't have to depend on your own programming skills to understand the source.
If Chromium includes some huge privacy issue - don't you think someone who HAS gone through the source might have mentioned it?
Four Million Lines Of Code (Score:2)
If Chromium includes some huge privacy issue - don't you think someone who HAS gone through the source might have mentioned it?
Chromium Lines of Code
[1,000 lines of code and over]
C++ 1.8 Million
C 604 K
XML 173 K
HTML 169 K
Autoconf 115 K
JavaScript 97 K
Python 82 K
Objective-C 59 K
shell script 47 K
Perl 13 K
Make 14 K
Tcl 7 K
Automake 1 K
C# 1 K
Chromium Comment Lines [Over 30,000]
C++ 297 K
C 182 K
JavaScript 42 k
python 38 K
Chromium (Google Chrome [ohloh.net]
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I'm sure the guys who made Iron took a good long look at it.
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I've gotta say, that was my first reaction. I don't see why Google would provide better genuine security provisions, they seem to make a fair bit of money out of people not having privacy.
Google's reputation for privacy is fast approaching Microsoft's for business ethics.
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it helps to actually have logic behind why you try to compare google to MS. You have provided: 0.
Meanwhile, why does google provide better tools? Simple. So you can have better control over your own data. Since when is that a bad thing?
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I wouldn't have thought I'd need to provide much to back up a claim that Google's reputation for privacy is bad and getting worse on Slashdot of all places.
I didn't say the lack of privacy was necessarily a bad thing. I use several Google tools precisely *because* Google
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there's a significant difference here.
put something on MS? There's no way out. It's there and permanently archived. They just "anonymize" after x months, which works out how well again? care to remind me or do I need to link articles?
put something on google? you can take your stuff out. Yes, it's still archived there.
Which of these sounds worse eh? You think MS is going to resist handing over your data for all those bing searches which you praised them for? considering that they made their own website to ma
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a bit the same. On technical grounds, I'd like to use Chrome instead of the increasingly bloated Firefox, and given sufficient privacy and security safeguards I could live without the other plug-ins I use.
But Chrome comes from Google, and releases often with an auto-updating mechanism. Given both Google's form for being wildly off-target on privacy issues (Buzz, etc.) and the openly dismissive/arrogant attitude exhibited by some of their senior executives, I just don't trust them not to pull a fast one and start logging every page I visit, or sneaking in ads at the browser level, or something along those lines.
Perhaps this could theoretically be avoided by careful checking of the small print before each update, or adjusting certain settings so things don't happen automatically, but I don't want to have to do that sort of thing just to be able to update my web browser safely and make sure no-one's sneaked anything in. I'll just use another browser instead.
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Edit: There is an HORRIFIC flash slide-in advertisement in their site. Easy to close, innocuous content, but it appears on Every. Single. Page. I just decided not to update my version of Iron.
Re:Google? Privacy? (Score:5, Informative)
Good choice. Iron is a very questionable project, and the developer has admitted that he's just spreading FUD about Google to drive traffic to his site to make money off ads.
Also, http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html [neugierig.org]
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I'd like to know why they have refused to host the sourcecode somewhere other than Rapidshare. Free downloads are not allowed from that site for something like 16 hours a day...
I have no problem with using a filehost site for the source, but they should use one that is friendly for free downloaders like Megaupload or Mediafire.
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But Chrome comes from Google, and releases often with an auto-updating mechanism
To be fair, Firefox comes with a very aggressive, annoying (IMHO) update mechanism built in and enabled by default.
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I don't have a problem with auto-updates being enabled by default, as long as the behaviour is openly stated and can be made to prompt or completely disabled by those who prefer to do so. On-by-default is sensible for something like a browser, given that probably most users would otherwise not update the system, which causes problems for them and, if their system gets compromised as a result, everyone else.
But this only works if you trust the source of the updates. Mozilla have never, to my knowledge, tried
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The difference is that most Firefox updates are just security fixes, with occasional (=2 per year) feature updates. Aggressive pushing of security fixes is IMHO a good thing.
Chrome is very much still in beta with major feature updates every few months. Google don't always think these new features through (okay, Mozilla don't either) and so life with Chrome is very much more at the whim of developers. I'm not saying it's necessarily bad, just a different proposition to Firefox which is a bit more stable.
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http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html [neugierig.org]
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They passed 1.0 a long while ago. Chromium is up at 5.0 and Chrome is already beyond 4.0!
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Opera have quite a lead, then, and Firefox aren't making big pushes to catch up from 3.x.
Or maybe it is uglyness rating: Opera scores over 10 for having a hideous default UI that looks out of place on all desktops; IE scores an 8 for...well, being IE with those stupid shiny buttons; Firefox is slowly moving up as it tries to look more like IE; Chrome perhaps over-rates itself, but it still gets points for not quite understanding that "GTK theme" shouldn't mean "pick the colours and use them in random places
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They never, ever did anything remotely like fighting it. They explicitly listed ad blocking as a use case while developing their extension system.
Hiding ads vs. not loading them in the first place (Score:2)
It's news because Goodbye Firefox (Score:2)
It's news because there are people like me who've been waiting for this functionality before switching.
The Firefox developers basically refused to make an interface for per-site permissions part of the core product [mozilla.org], forcing everyone to use CS Lite and NoScript or similar. They do the job, but every time there's a new version you have compatibility problems.
As soon as these new functions hit the Linux and Mac versions of Chrome, I'm saying goodbye to Firefox. It's slow, bloated and crashy, and I've only been
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Yes, but Opera's UI lets it down. There doesn't seem to be any way to make site preferences into a toolbar button, so you either have to wander through hierarchical menus to find it, or right-click.
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Really? The Mozilla bug for a Javascript whitelist is about ten years old now and still unfixed. Why the hell do I need a half-megabyte extension full of extraneous baggage I don't need for such a basic feature?
Even Internet-fucking-Explorer FOUR can do this.
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How annoying that would be? Being a developer 90%+ of the web sites I browse are in English which is not my native language. Hopefully it will respect the browser language settings (I use an English browser) or it can be switched off.
Answering to your question, maybe this is what you're looking for https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/918 [mozilla.org]
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The in-browser translation option interests me, too. I've had Firefox plug-ins in the past that help me translate Japanese pages. From TFA, though:
Wieland Holfelder, Google 's Engineering Director in Munich, said: "... The translate feature will hopefully open up the web for people to discover new, compelling content - no matter what language it's written in".
How will people discover this new content unless some translation is going on in the search engine as well? For example, if I type "red bird" into Google search, will it also find French pages containing "rouge oiseau"?