Firefox’s new tracking and how to turn it off

18 July 2024 | Computers, How Does it Work?, Spare Me! | 1 comment

Firefox Privacy Preserving AttributionWell, here we go again…

A few years ago, Google announced FLoC, which I talked about here.

In short:

Led by Google, a group of businesses and advertisers is pushing a new standard that would have your browser identifying your particular group of interests by a unique ID number.

This number will be sent to all sites you visit. VOILA! No more 3rd party cookies, and supposedly more privacy!

Fast forward three years, and Mozilla is jumping on the bandwagon with their own such technology.

So, how do you turn it off?

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Make Thunderbird work with your Gmail account

8 March 2022 | Computers, How to | 11 comments

Thunderbird Gmail with IMAP and OAuth2If you use Thunderbird to download e-mails from your Gmail account, it may stop working soon.

You may remember a similar thing happening not long ago. Google insisted that POP3 mail accounts were, “not secure enough”.

So, you had to go through a convoluted process on Google to enable “less secure” Tbird to play nicely with POP3 for Gmail.

Right. Now, Gmail will effectively shut off POP3 completely for Thunderbird users by May 30, 2022.

So, how do you fix it?

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Thunderbird 78: Change is in the air, but don’t panic!

22 September 2020 | Computers | 33 comments

Thunderbird Reborn!So there I was, reading my e-mail the other day, when I received an upgrade notice from Thunderbird.

Great! Maybe they’ll fix things… So I upgraded.

Welcome to Thunderbird 78, where everything has changed!

Well, sort of…

My add-ons no longer worked, the folder pane was hideously black and white, I lost my CompactHeaders, and my message pane buttons were all screwed up. SIGH…

But, not to worry… Big things are in store for good old Tbird, and many of the annoying changes are easy to fix!

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Is Firefox Content Blocking screwed up?

12 March 2019 | Computers | 5 comments

Recently, Mozilla introduced a fabulous new feature to Firefox: Content Blocking!

The idea is that Firefox will automagically block the tracking processes of web sites to increase your privacy.

By default, this tracking should only be enabled in Private Browsing Mode, which makes sense. You don’t want everyone’s web site experiences to be suddenly broken.

One minor detail: It appears that for many people, “broken” is exactly what Content Blocking is…

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