> Sure. Ublock Origin already does this today at the request level, so you don't even need to worry about pages re-adding the attributes. But we could just as e

> Sure. Ublock Origin already does this today at the request level, so you don't even need to worry about pages re-adding the attributes. But we could just as easily use this argument to get rid of every privacy-protecting decision in the browser. Why should Firefox care about Canvas fingerprinting if an extension can block it instead? I view browsers supporting ping as absolutely a privacy-protecting measure. As long as the browser can be relied-upon to support it, developers will use it instead of more invasive techniques, which means not only is it a better UX for the users, but the amount of information collected by each ping is a known quantity, and browsers can also do things like defer executing ping requests for battery reasons or to reduce the amount of timing information given to the recipient. I would have no objection to browsers disabling pings if JavaScript is also disabled at the browser level, but that's a fairly niche edge case and I don't have any strong opinions there (and of course even with JS disabled a site could still serve up a static page where all outbound links go through a redirect domain anyway; supporting pings by default even with JS disabled encourages developers to just always use it, and then the people who really care can run an extension to disable it). > Like you correctly mentioned above, ping attributes are trivial to block. If a developer is being forced to implement tracking, even with ping attributes available more broadly, they're still gonna use an additional method that gets through the most widely used ad blockers on the market -- and that means Javascript click events. Force-enabling the ping attribute will not change a single thing about that developer's approach. The more privacy-protecting measures browsers have by default, the less aggressive people will be about using third-party extensions to do the same thing. And given what I said above, it might be a good idea fo adblockers to allow pings by default and only disable them upon request. As you said, if ping isn't reliable developers will use something else, so the goal here is make ping reliable. If it's reliable, people will use it, and using ping is far better than the other techniques available. > Don't be too pessimistic, loading speed is one of the primary reasons why the average person installs an adblocker to begin with. It is very hard to get people to care about privacy, but lots of people are still installing ad blockers purely because they improve the UX experience. That's a success story. We're talking about delays clicking on outbound links though. If a big site adds 100ms to the loading time of outbound links, most users are going to blame the external site for that because they don't understand that the delay is being added before the request is made. This means that big sites can add outbound link tracking with very little penalty, and in fact the additional delay, if anything, is going to encourage users to stay on the site instead of visiting external sites.