Mozilla is definitely taking the wrong road here.

So, I was browsing through my RSS aggregator this morning when I came across this Slashdot article describing how Firefox developers are adding a “feature” to upcoming Firefox versions to ping a site when you click on a link, so sites can track what links you follow. This bugs me both because of the privacy implications and because it’s not a W3C specification. This is no better than the stupid games Microsoft played in the past with non-standard additions to Internet Explorer.

I’m not amused. In the case of internal sites, you already have that information in the logs. In the case of external sites, it’s really none of their damn business which links I follow—if I link to Google or the best blonde joke ever, it really isn’t any concern of mine whether you follow it or not. While it appears that FF devs are going to provide some kind of visual notification, they don’t plan to have an option in the interface or when first clicking a “ping” link to turn it off, since they apparently argue that most users would turn it off. News flash: If you have a feature that most users would turn off if given the choice, perhaps you shouldn’t include that feature!

Fortunately, you can still go into about:config and disable browser.send_pings, which is something I plan on doing on every machine I’ve got access to. I’ve also written a Greasemonkey user script which pulls every link tag in the document and does .removeAttribute() on “ping” if it exists. I’ll be posting that later today when I get home from work and have a chance to put up a small page for it. I see no reason to make it any easier or less expensive for web sites to track my every move, especially when it takes me off their site—it isn’t any of their business.
Firefox has generally had a good track record on privacy, user control, and standards adherence. I do hope they reconsider this course of action rather than push ahead with such an ill-advised “feature.”