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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

IMHO this was totally expected and is an argument for "browser neutrality" --- I believe a browser shouldn't be doing this or many other things by default.

Modifying URLs and filtering page content should be the responsibility of extensions and the like. I personally use a filtering proxy.

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Since there's zero chance that websites and ad companies will stop their spying and manipulation (let's call it "webpage neutrality"), what you're proposing is unilateral disarmament. To require a lot of know-how and tech savvy to get privacy, while leaving the common user to the mercy of a hostile web.

This is like the argument that the Do Not Track flag was illegitimate if the browser defaulted it to 'on'. An argument that is never applied to tracking or the countless "by visiting this webpage you consent to.."

Why can't I as a user have a browser that's privacy-enabled out of the box without any extensions?

It's called Safari.

The same Safari which is doing poorly on privacy extensions?

You need privacy "extensions" a lot less if you design your platform for privacy to begin with.

This is opt in, not enabled by default, and requires you to intentionally pick 'Strict' which has a warning as its first line of text that says some sites may break.

Firefox is not doing this by default I'm pretty sure

My understanding is that Firefox, and eventually all the other browsers, intend to do something like this by default. They are all working to prevent cross site tracking, linking your activity on one site to your activity on another. For example, Chrome has: "In parallel to that we will aggressively combat the current techniques for non-cookie based cross-site tracking, such as fingerprinting, cache inspection, link decoration, network tracking and Personally Identifying Information (PII) joins." -- https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

Though "Enhanced Tracking Protection" is easy to opt-in.

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