The HTML “ping” attribute is disabled in Firefox | Hacker News Reader

The HTML “ping” attribute is disabled in Firefox

webplatform.news

18 pointsSimeVidas12 comments

This clearly shows the different priorities for Google and Mozilla, amid the current feud.

Mozilla is advocating towards a free and open internet, where the web standards are not dictated by the monetization strategies du-jour. Meaning that ads and tracking are not inherent to the internet itself, but serve a more corporate interest.

This is where Google comes in. It feels more like they consider the internet more of a platform for business growth and are no longer that unbiased.

As an example - I wouldn't be surprised if at some point they start pushing for adding product metadata to the HTML spec, say a <product> tag. This would essentially change some of the semantics of the standard. Maybe a more generalized version of this: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/product

Just my 2¢.

I really cannot get why reverting to JavaScript is better. I believe Mozilla people are professional and know what they do, but some explanation would be welcome.

Good. uBlock Origin also has a feature that disables this spyware.

Great, and instead you get to go through a redirect which tracks the same information but is slower.

So at least sites that spy on their users will have a worse UX than before. That is an improvement, though a small one.

Speak for yourself. In my opinion, the ability to count how many people click on which search results, and rank results higher if they get a lot of clicks (excluding cases where the user then pressed back and picked another result), seems like a good way to boost result quality without having much impact on privacy.

Full disclosure – I also allow Google to track my search history for personalization, but I think there are many good reasons to dislike that, I understand why people turn it off, and while I don't, I'd prefer a personalization method that doesn't require such granular data.

This kind of tracking might be worth it, given informed consent by the user. If the user does not consent, it is spying. Especially if you have to bypass intentional privacy protections, in this case the disabling of the ping feature.

Or Firefox will end up with a worse UX than before. I'm pretty sure the spying sites offer the cumbersome solution only to browsers that have ping disabled.

What you need is a browser that claims to honour ping but doesn't.

I do not think Mozilla can keep that secret.

Neither the code nor the server has to know which browser you are.

Ugh. With datalist values (Which hasn’t been fixed for 6 years) and another breakage of web standard by firefox I’ve seen, in a week. Can’t believe firefox actually insulted Internet Explorer for rigging standards.

What’s the point of disabling it when you can mimic the feature with javascript?

FYI, you appear to be shadowbanned.

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