Misc. Ramblings

There is an old axiom that says just because you are well versed in one area does not mean you are in all areas.

Such seems to be the case, once again, with the Mozilla browser called Firefox. It seems they've added a "feature" to their branch builds (By branch build they are referring to non-stable, testing versions of Firefox). This feature, called a ping attribute on anchor and area HTML tags, provides that "When a user follows a link via one of these tags, the browser will send notification pings to the specified URLs after following the link." That is, when you click on a link that includes this new ping attribute, you will automatically send a ping message to a server informing them what your IP is, what IP you went to, when, what browser/operating system you have, etc.

Be clear, websites get this information now, without using this new attribute. What the folks at Mozilla are doing is implementing a way that, according to them, will speed up response times when compared to sites that use re-directs to get the same information. In their estimation, it is better to provide this attribute and speed up the 'net than it is to do nothing or actively oppose businesses who implement user tracking (i.e.,removing such re-directs would also speed up the response times on the 'net).

As a quick reading of the comments to the announcement indicate, there are those who disagree that implementing the attribute is a Good Thing(tm). I happen to agree with the comments. To me, this feature is like the "pre-fetch" debacle in which Firefox, by default and without any user intervention, downloads the pages linked to the page you are currently viewing. So, for example, you do a search on Google and it displays 25 links to other pages. Firefox will go ahead and download and store on your PC each of those 25 pages without your knowledge or approval. Obviously, should the police/FBI/Homeland Security/your employer one day knock on your door and ask why are you going to sites with illegal content, you can thank Firefox's "feature".

It appears the developers of these Firefox features have not learned from the problems plaguing Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Further, the developers need to understand that security, transparency, and privacy come before performance. That is, I'd rather use a slightly slower browser that is secure than one that is faster but a vector for all kinds of problems.

That said, Firefox is still more secure than IE and based on that, I will continue to use Firefox. But should the Firefox developers continue to be blind to the foreseeable and logical consequences of their features, I may need to start looking for something else.

Aloha!