Firefox

Firefox Relay vs DuckDuckGo email

I signed up for DuckDuckGo’s privacy relay email service (https://duckduckgo.com/email) as soon as i could. Aside from their little dust up about them sending some of your info to Microsoft (https://thenextweb.com/news/duckduckgo-microsoft-tracking-sparks-backlash) they’ve got a good track record re: privacy. I signed up for some CNet and PCMag newsletters and found that DuckDuckGo removed a few trackers from every email they sent. Yay DuckDuckGo! But one of the things I don’t like is they don’t provide a dashboard – I can’t see what duck aliases I’ve created and used.

So, I signed up for a paid Firefox Relay account cuz they do have a dashboard! What’s more, you can associate each email with the website or service you’ve used it with! Major yay! I signed up new Relay email addresses for CNet and PCMag newsletters and began comparing the duck emails with the relay emails. Relay isn’t removing ANY trackers!?! I emailed Relay support and got a fairly prompt response however it wasn’t terribly satisfying. The relay folks are being very responsible and making sure that the trackers they remove don’t break the email – yay them! I’m continuing to correspond with Relay’s support on this topic. In the meantime, I suggest you go with the free DuckDuckGo email relay service if you want a little more privacy in your newsletter traffic, dashboard notwithstanding.

Firefox Relay vs DuckDuckGo email Read More »

Maybe you don’t need that domain after all…

Firefox Relay (https://relay.firefox.com/ has just exited beta and now has a premium tier ($1/month) that gives you more than the 5 email aliases the free plan provides.
I’ve been a big proponent of paying for an email service like FastMail.com and buying your own domain so you have an unlimited number of email addresses available to you. But it requires some geek work to bring it all together. Services like SimpleLogin.com provide similar capabilities by generating unique email addresses for you and forwarding them to an address you specify when you sign up. Mozilla’s service isn’t all that different but it’s from Mozilla and it’s pretty cheap (right now…they say it’s a promotional price with no mention of when the price will go up), Still, it’s a worthwhile investment if you don’t feel like giving your precious personal email address out to various websites and newsletters.

Maybe you don’t need that domain after all… Read More »

And now for something completely different …

Firefox always re-selects the entire URL in the address bar when I go away and then return to the Firefox window and that’s always annoyed me. Now, courtesy of lifehacker I’ve reset that behavior. How? From the Address bar, enter “about:config” (sans quotes). Locate browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll and change its value to false.

And, while I’m at it, here are a couple of other things I’ve found:

Firefox extension Stop Autoplay.
Two Adobe Reader replacements: Sumatra and Foxit. Sumatra has a very small footprint but Foxit is more complete.

And now for something completely different … Read More »