This is a great solution to a problem that seems to becoming more prevalent. Reminder to devs that bolted on third party scripts should not be in the critical path. Meaning, if you are doing something like capturing a click event in a Google analytics handler and blocking the redirect until you’ve tracked the click - you’re going to have a bad time. Many tracking scripts are designed for this and will gracefully/silently fail via something like an array push mechanism but I’ve encountered the opposite as well.<p>Being an indie dev with a pihole setup has been tough - I’ve gotta turn it off a lot for various client projects - but it’s also helped me build more resilient applications that work just as well for people who don’t have trackers enabled.
> The SmartBlock stand-ins are bundled with Firefox: no actual third-party content from the trackers are loaded at all, so there is no chance for them to track you this way.<p>Those third party scripts may not be able to track, but I wonder if the act of loading the stand-in scripts quickly (?) from within Firefox would lead to other issues.<p>> We also want to acknowledge the NoScript and uBlock Origin teams for helping to pioneer this approach.<p>Not to belittle the effort by others and other projects, but these two extensions, along with some others (like Privacy Badger), have helped users immensely in protecting themselves.
Next step (please): block all 1x1 sized images.<p>The transparent pixel tracking trick is common enough now that it should be blocked by default in all 'Private' modes.
If this works, it will be a very welcome development. Firefox is still my preferred primary browser given who the competition is, but the number of normal, everyday sites I visit that don't work properly in Firefox has become irritating. It appears that quite a few of those problems are caused by the security/privacy blocking rather than a lack of other functionality in Firefox, and it's usually the blocking by Firefox itself rather than any relevant add-ons because disabling the latter doesn't solve the problem.
"a number of common scripts" - I wish they would have linked to where to find the technical details of which scripts they are emulating. Anyone know where this can be found?
Based on the comparison shown between using the third party scripts with tracking, and using the smart block stand-in, I wonder if this could be an edge against Chrome? While the Google team can push the envelope, pay for whatever is necessary, and add their own standards (such as AMP, though that may be going away IIRC), they're likely stuck waiting on trackers just like Firefox was (on non-AMP pages).
Tracking vs. privacy is an arms race and the current endgame looks like server-side tracking vs. VPNs/virtual clients.<p>I wonder what Mozilla's plan is for blocking/mitigating server-side tracking?
Why not add something to protect the web security?
XSS protection ?
CSRF protection?
We could do those things in the browser and not in every website in existance…
Anything "smart" and "intelligent" is by now firmly associated with "we are watching you" in my brain. Maybe not the case here ... let's hope.