Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center Letting You Track the Trackers - The Mozilla Blog

the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions

John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.

Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.

Mozilla betrays Firefox users and its nominal principles

That’s a harsh headline but it is unfortunately deserved. We should indeed hold Mozilla to a higher standard.

Monica at Mozilla: Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015

I believe that Mozilla can make progress in privacy, but leadership needs to recognize that current advertising practices that enable “free” content are in direct conflict with security, privacy, stability, and performance concerns — and that Firefox is first and foremost a user-agent, not an industry-agent.

Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought - Bitestring’s Blog

How browser fingerprinting works and what you can do about it (if you use Firefox).

Lou Montulli and the invention of cookie | Hidden Heroes

Steven Johnson profiles Lou Montulli, creator of the cookie, and ponders unintended consequences:

Years ago, the mathematician Edward Lorenz proposed a metaphor to describe how very small elements in a system’s initial conditions can lead to momentous changes over time. Imagining a tornado that ultimately emerges out of the tiny air perturbations caused by the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, Lorenz called it the “butterfly effect.” For better and for worse, Montulli’s cookie may be the most pronounced example of a technological butterfly effect in our time. But instead of a butterfly flapping its wings, it’s a 23-year-old programmer writing a few lines of code to make a shopping cart feature work. Almost three decades later, we’re still riding out the storm that code helped create.