Here's a mind-blowing but obvious realization: the Internet is one giant shopping litmus test lab, with billions of voluntary participants helping big corporations fine-tune their products and marketing strategies. This is done without the use of elaborate, interruptive questionnaires. All it takes is some Javascript running behind every visible Web page, and Bob's your uncle.

The most pervasive form of marketing is, you guessed right, online ads. Shown to you in all sorts of shapes and colors, they not only peddle wondrous solutions, they also directly and indirectly measure (i.e. track) the human response to the shown content, and this wealth of statistical data is used to make future products and future ads work even better for the selling party. On its own, this might not be bad, except people are greedy. What might have been just innocent marketing has become one giant data harvesting industry, going way beyond simple browsing habits. If you are not so keen on participating mind and soul, you are probably using an ad blocker tool of some sort. We talked about Noscript, we talked about UMatrix, we talked about Adblock Plus. Today, we will talk about Ghostery.

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Ghostery is an interesting tool, with a pleasant interface, flexible and granular control of tracking elements, some odd quirks, and a questionable opt-in feature. It is indeed as I expected, a bridge between a plug-n-play ad blocker and a fully featured Javascript manager like Noscript. The good thing is, it works well in unison with either one of these, so you can mix. Shake 'n' bake. For example, intimidated by Noscript or UMatrix? You can use Adblock Plus plus [sic] Ghostery. The former for ads, the latter for extra trackers, no crippling of Javascript functionality. And then, the tool can block ads on its own, too.

I believe Ghostery works best in the complementary mode. It is also best suited for less skilled users who seek more control than just ad blocking, and the cross-platform availability sure makes it appealing. The one thing that remains outstanding is the use of the opt-in policy. Not sure how that fits into the larger scheme of things. That said, I believe it's worth testing and exploring. So far, I'm pleased with its mode of work, and the results from my escapade are promising. Now whether one should really care about these trackers and all that, well that's a separate story. Or as they say, all your ad are belong to us.

It’s been a long time since we covered news aggregators, and there’s been notable entrants and leavers to the scene. With regard to the leavers, Google Reader was discontinued in July 2013. And software like Newsbeuter, RSSOwl, Blogbridge, and Bloglines have been abandoned by their respective developers. Fortunately, there’s a number of great replacements that have filled the void.

A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.

For individuals that read lots of weblogs, a news aggregator makes keeping track of them effortless, and particularly useful if the weblogs are only updated occasionally.

There are a number of different file formats which information publishers use. The most frequently ones are RSS and Atom. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. It is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. In other words, RSS is a Web content syndication format.

• Vivaldi 2.1 Adds AV1 Video Codec Support, Puts More Power into Quick Commands

  Vivaldi Technologies released today Vivaldi 2.1, the first point release to the 2.x series of the Chromium-based, cross-platform web browser.

  Vivaldi is known as "the web browser for power users," so Vivaldi 2.1 continues to bring more productivity additions in an attempt to make you more efficient when using Vivaldi to browse the Web or do whatever work you're doing at the office. The start of this release is Quick Commands, which received a bunch of new features.

• Chrome 71 Beta Offers Low-Latency Canvas Contexts, International Relative Time

  With Google Chrome/Chromium 70 having debuted last week, promoted now from dev to beta is Chrome 71.

  Chrome 71 Beta introduces a new JavaScript interface for an international relative time format with support for multiple languages/words/phrases for handling relative time measurements. The new beta also has new full-screen options for Android, the full-screen API itself is now un-prefixed, new TextEncoderStream and TextDecoderStream APIs, various interoperability improvements, and other developer changes primarily around JavaScript and some CSS.

• Chrome 71 Beta: relative time formats and more

  Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. View a complete list of the features in Chrome 71 on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 71 is beta as of October 25, 2018.

• Brave Browser Team Up With Tor

   

  TOR [sic] or The Onion Router uses technology that separates your computer from the website you’re viewing by routing the network traffic through 3 seperate servers before it reaches your computer. That being said Brave Core Beta hasn’t been fully tested yet so “users should not rely on it for serious use just yet,” Brave said.

 

• Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

  When Firefox 64 arrives in December, support for RSS, the once celebrated content syndication scheme, and its sibling, Atom, will be missing.

  "After considering the maintenance, performance and security costs of the feed preview and subscription features in Firefox, we’ve concluded that it is no longer sustainable to keep feed support in the core of the product," said Gijs Kruitbosch, a software engineer who works on Firefox at Mozilla, in a blog post on Thursday.

  RSS – which stands for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, as you see fit – is an XML-based format for publishing and subscribing to web content feeds. It dates back to 1999 and for a time was rather popular, but been disappearing from a variety of applications and services since then.

  Mozilla appears to have gotten the wrecking ball rolling in 2011 when it removed the RSS button from Firefox. The explanation then was the same as it is now: It's just not very popular.

• Cameron Kaiser: It's baaaaa-aaack: TenFourFox Intel

  It's back! It's undead! It's ugly! It's possibly functional! It's totally unsupported! It's ... TenFourFox for Intel Macs!

  Years ago as readers of this blog will recall, Claudio Leite built TenFourFox 17.0.2 for Intel, which the update check-in server shows some determined users are still running to this day on 10.5 and even 10.4 despite various problems such as issue 209. However, he didn't have time to maintain it, and a newer version was never built, though a few people since then have made various attempts and submitted some patches.

  One of these attempts is now far enough along to the point where I'm permitted to announce its existence. Riccardo Mottola has done substantial work on getting TenFourFox to build and run again on old Intel Macs with a focus on 32-bit compatibility, and his patches have been silently lurking in the source code repository for some time. Along with Ken Cunningham's additional work, who now also has a MacPorts portfile so you can build it yourself (PowerPC support in the portfile is coming, though you can still use the official instructions, of course), enough functions in the new Intel build that it can be used for basic tasks.