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Comment by bhaney | Hacker News Reader

> Browser support is good, but not great. At the time of this writing, Firefox specifically doesn’t have it enabled by default

Little sad that Firefox not supporting an API only downgrades that API's browser support to "good" instead of "unusable" these days

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This is a feature built specifically for tracking. Firefox takes anti-tracking measures.

Another example is trimming referrer URLs (just keeping the domain).

I wasn't commenting on Firefox's decision to not enable the API, I was commenting on how the author appears to consider Firefox to not be very significant.

Well they aren't wrong.

Firefox has a 3.5% market share, plummeting down from 8% five years ago. "Not very significant" is an understatement.

What is wrong with the rest of Hacker News users they they keep in using the google browser?

Though according to caniuse, beacons is fully implemented which has much the same effect from a tracking PoV.

As a side note, I was somehow completely unaware of that feature (and I don't think in a "heard about it and forgot" sort of way). Every day is a school day...

On the mdn page for it they say there are other less legitimate techniques like adding an image which will start loading and delay the page unloading. So if they didn't add beacons it would mean other less performant ways would be (ab)used.

Interesting that commenters here assert "most users don't want to be tracked," whereas in fact most users happily choose Chrome over any privacy-focused platforms.

Firefox market share is about the same as something called Samsung Internet. Do you test your website with "Samsung Internet" browser?

There's Chrome and there's Safari. Rest of browsers are rounding errors. And even those rounding errors are mostly chromiums. Sad indeed.

Samsung Internet is Chromium-based. There's little need to test it separately as there is with Firefox.

Firefox is unlucky that its remaining users furiously hate everything tracking-related, and are ready to burn Mozilla to the ground for even tiniest suspicion of any transgression. Therefore, Mozilla can't choose a lesser evil here, because it's still seen as evil.

Firefox markets itself and openly protests for privacy rights. To go against it would completely shatter the users trust.

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