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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

It solves the problem that the majority of firefox users is not blocking trackers

Is that a problem, however? Or more precisely, one that Mozilla wants to think is a problem and "solve"?

I use adblocking and such myself, but I think it should really be a personal choice --- browsers should just stay neutral. I have a suspicion that browser organisations taking sides in this will only lead to even more invasive tracking in the future, since this is a cat-and-mouse game. (Imagine if Firefox had adblock by default. It would just force adtech companies to come up with even more unblockable methods, since the defaults have changed.)

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Like when browsers implemented popup blockers. Now we have even more invasive unblockable popups?

Websites can't do anything the browser doesn't allow. Or said another way, websites can only do what the browser was programmed to support. The browser is the decider.

Like when browsers implemented popup blockers. Now we have even more invasive unblockable popups?

Now the popups are almost always not new windows, but "pop-overs" inside the page itself.

If you start a war, you should be prepared to fight for a long time. That's why most browser makers don't even start.

Safari did and had to make multiple changes to ITP because criteo was fighting back.

It is always necessary to stay vigilant.

> browsers should just stay neutral.

Browsers are user agents - they should behave as such.

Trackers only exist because of decisions they made (to store files on behalf of users that websites ask them to). They made that choice for users. Now they are realizing that isn't always the right choice and are looking to make a slightly different choice.

If ads have to come from the primary domain being served, then the website has greater incentive to vet those ads. If they let malware through, it's their reputation that goes in the trash. No more letting adtech do the dirty work.

Not really. It's as simple as hosting some scripts or using a CDN for a local proxy. Plenty of publishers are already doing this.

If reputation was really that important, these sites wouldn't have put up these low-quality ad networks in the first place. It's not like they didnt know what was running.

Allowing third-party cookies wasn't a neutral decision to begin with, even though the implications only became clear later.

> browsers should just stay neutral

You mean this as a pragmatic choice, or moral choice? Because on a purely pragmatic level I somewhat agree with you - a popular browser making such decisions is risking either losing users, or furthering the cat&mouse game. But on the moral/ethical level, the browser is an user agent - providing features allowing users to enforce their preferences is a good thing.

Linux based OSes don't let you install software from a new repository without adding their keys to your system. This is for the user's own security. Blocking 3rd party tracker cookies by default is a similar decision. Sometimes developers have to protect users from choice overload and choose sensible defaults.

> it should really be a personal choice

Yes, but now it is not an educated choice, most simply have no idea they're tracked. Ask any person, "do you agree to being tracked?" Answer is obvious, so why not implement it in browsers by default?

Hang in. You could ask people “do you want to pay taxes?” And get a similar result. Doesn’t mean we should get rid of taxes.

Taxes == tracking ? I owe taxes by law. Whats the law for mandatory web tracking ?

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