In the post, I list things I noticed while using the web. I use firefox only for banking, tax and looking at financial web sites.

A majority of web sites have:

  • google analytics, tag manager and font, that's for easy web analytics
  • cdn, in general for availability and ddos protection
  • third party cookie service
  • ads and tracking

The sites with the most ads and tracking are the web shop sites.

It seems the web designer create designs and use as many third party service as possible sometimes even for auth. A popular third party service is browser-update.org, it is a privacy issue since 200.000 sites are using this service so it can track me across these sites.

In firefox (and chrome) tabs are taking 3GB ram to display 100 words. That's because it saves the rendered page in vectors and pixels to speed up the response time after user interactions.

I use pihole to block third party service and recently I had banking service not working because pihole was silently blocking one of their services. Pihole downloads block lists from the internet so someone added my banking service to the block list. To solve this issue, I added my banking service to the whitelist in the pihole admin page.

On android, I can't access http:// sites both in chrome and firefox. In my case, the http server is secure because it is located on my private network. Google removed access to http site because it is unsecure in general. With safari in iOS, I can access my http sites so that's fine.

I have in iPad2 bought 2010 and the operating system hasn't been updated since 2016, it doesn't have the new root certicates (for example, the one from let's encrypt) and the newer encryption algorithms are also missing.. So on my ipad2, I get Network Error when accessing some web sites including mine. For some web sites, I get Invalid certifacte and I just need to accept it.

When I want to read information on the web, I use w3m because it is fast and I can use from the command line (I have a script to search the web directly from the command line). I noticed this in w3m:

  • some links are not working because they run javascript
  • some images are not displayed because there are loaded with javascipt
  • some pages are not displayed because they are in a web app.

Sometimes, CDNs tell me I'm a bot, but I hasn't happened last few months. I was getting the following message from cloudflare:

Please enable cookies.

One more step

Please complete the security check to access www.cyberciti.biz

Please stand by, while we are checking your browser...

Redirecting...

Please turn JavaScript on and reload the page.

Please enable Cookies and reload the page.

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Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to
the web property.

What can I do to prevent this in the future?

If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus
scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network
administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or
infected devices.

Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass.
You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Firefox Add-ons Store.

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