GNOME's Web Browser Enables AdBlock & Do-Not-Track By Default

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME's Web Browser Enables AdBlock & Do-Not-Track By Default

With GNOME 3.18 the Epiphany web-browser will now enable AdBlock usage by default as well as setting the Do-Not-Track headers by default...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Epiphany-Ad-Block

[Modu]

IMO the best news about Epiphany is with the recent webkitgtk+-2.8.5 release, it fixed loads of crashes which made it unusable. It's at least stable on X11 now.

[Calinou]

If a browser with significant market share were to set DNT by default, advertising companies and analytics platforms would just ignore it...

[Guest]

If a browser with significant market share were to set DNT by default, advertising companies and analytics platforms would just ignore it...

Didn't this happen already? I thought MS did this back with some Internet Explorer release, and therefore, most companies already ignore the flag.

[ssokolow]

Ugh! The whole POINT of the DNT header is to express user choice. It's intended as a unified replacement for the endless piles of network-specific opt-out cookies set by extensions like Beef TACO (Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out)

(That's why it's a tri-state unset/true/false value. The "false" value allows users to explicitly express consent as distinct from "unspecified".)

At best, Epiphany will get its own version of that "If MS-IE, filter out DNT header" Apache config that was making the rounds earlier on.

[reub2000]

Was there ever any reason for advertising and analytics platforms companies to pay attention the DNT flag in the first place?

[DanL]

Was there ever any reason for advertising and analytics platforms companies to pay attention the DNT flag in the first place?

No, it's idealistic/wishful thinking that marketers have ethics and respect your privacy.

[Luke]

I recently replaced Rekonq with Epiphany as a backup browser and kgpg with gpa so I could remove hundreds of MB of old KDE4 packages. Nice browser, but adblock by default and DNT don't actually block all the trackers and especially browser fingerprinting. As such, it's a backup browser for using known safe sites like Archive and DuckDuckGo if Firefox is either down with a bug or I'm running the laptop and need more responsiveness. Epiphany is deliberatly built light, there's no way to include things like NoScript and Disconnect. On the other hand, an up to date list of all known malicious trackers 127.0.0.1'ed out in /etc/hosts will safe any browser. I use that too-in fact that's where I block Facebook and Google, but keeping up with an ever-changing list of malicious sites is impossible for one person. Also, random websites found by search are themselves a major vector of malicious javascript-I don't ever enable JS on an unknown random site for that reason. If I get a blank page because of that, I close the tab and move on.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Hopefully GNOME won't crap the bed on what it calls unverified TLS certs. Lots of sites don't load properly within Epiphany because of it. Make exceptions importing certs don't solve the problem completely, especially with sites like Facebook using Akamai as a distribution source.

[Anvil]

Epiphany is a crapola browser IMO. not even worth using. Bookmarking is shit for one, the list could go on.