Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Firefox's Ping Considered Harmful

The Firefox browser has implemented a ping attribute on HTML anchors and areas. The idea is to notify a different URL when the link is clicked and is meant for Web usage tracking. The justification is that since link trackers are doing this anyway with Javascript hacks, why not make it cleaner?

I am surprised that the Mozilla team would encode this in an HTML change. I thought they would prefer to fight this sort of privacy invasion instead of encoding it in an Open Source project. So much for Open Source being equivalent to Open Society.

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