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It's being reported on HackerNews that the Pale Moon Browser is blocking the AdNauseum extension, an ad blocking extension designed to obfuscate browsing data and protect users from tracking by advertising networks.
The main story link is to the Pale Moon Forum which summarises the issue as follows:
After investigating the AdNauseam extension's behavior and the results for web publishers, the extension has been added to the Pale Moon blocklist with a severity level of 2 (meaning you won't be able to enable it unless you increase the blocking level in about:config to 3). For those unfamiliar with this extension: it generates false ad "clicks" to ad servers in an attempt to generate "noise" for the ad networks in a protest against the advertising network system as a whole.
While the premise behind this is similar to poisoning trackers with false fingerprints (which we are proponents of, ourselves), and we normally let users decide for themselves what they want to do with their browser, we are strictly against allowing extensions that cause direct damage (including damage to third parties). There is a subtle but important difference between blocking content and generating fake user interaction.
[...] Because this extension causes direct and indirect economic damage to website owners, it is classified as malware, and as such blocked.
From the forum threads this decision has been slightly controversial with some users.
If you're not familiar with Pale Moon, it is an Open Source web browser, forked from a mature Mozilla code release, and has been covered on SN before.
[Update: Added text re: blocking level; bolded text that was bold in the original posting. --martyb]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @04:38PM (3 children)
I think it's very reasonable for Pale Moon's users to be worried. Many of them experienced first-hand what happened to Firefox. It started off with small unwanted changes. Then it snowballed into huge unwanted changes like Australis. Over time all of these unwanted changes just ruined the Firefox experience for so many users. Pale Moon users are fearing that the same thing is now happening to their new browser of choice. They fear this cycle is starting again...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @07:12AM (2 children)
This is nothing like what happened with Firefox. Firefox's most severe changes left the user with no choice at all - take it or leave it. Pale Moon has changed its default behavior, yet retains an option in its settings to re-enable the existing behavior. This sort of behavior changing is the ideal way to manage such changes: leave it up to the user.
If you're arguing that users are too dumb to navigate to a specific setting in about:config, you're arguing a different premise than mere changes to Pale Moon's default behavior.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:29AM (1 child)
But they didn't start as such. For example, many of the interface changes could be reversed by installing appropriate extensions. So users thought "well, this sucks; but hey, there are extensions to at least limit the sucking to a minimum." With nobody expecting those extensions to go away, since extensibility was one of the main selling points of Firefox.
Now all those extensions will no longer work (and the new extension interface does no longer support such modifications), so users who don't switch will get all the interface changes at once. But the interface changes themselves were done in the past; had they not been done back then, those extensions would not have been needed to begin with.
Also note that Pale Moon users are not random people. They are almost exclusively people who are going away from Firefox due to Mozilla's decisions.
To make a comparison: Pale Moon doing this is as if Soylent News did a Slashdot style Beta.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:40AM
I'm one of such people who walked away from Firefox due to their user-hostile policies. Changing default behavior of programs shouldn't be done lightly, but agree or not, the AdNauseum addon change deemed serious enough to warrant it. I didn't leave Firefox over their interference with the "skip cert error" addon since a few tweaks retained full addon functionality - I left Firefox because they regularly forced technical changes on me and left me no option but "take it or leave it". I left it. (Slashdot Beta did the same thing - forced changes with no user option to retain the old behavior.)
Not only does Pale Moon already provide an existing about:config option for retaining the previous default behavior, a new File-Options-Options menu item will be created to make these settings even more accessible to users [palemoon.org].
When Pale Moon starts telling me "take it or leave it", I'll leave it - but that has not happened now and shows no sign of doing so.