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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @05:24PM (1 child)
I am disappointed at how he handled it.
If he spun it another way, maybe it would have been easier to swallow. Politics can be quite sensitive when people demand to get what they paid for in regards to free software.
If he'd made it easier to install anyway with a prompt that said this type of add-on potentially reveals real info about you as it sends off fake info, perhaps the disclaimer would be satisfying enough... but I think his ideology did get in the way.
I guess he also makes money off the ads on his website for a free product, and thus he probably suffered somewhat from what he has enabled others to do. He probably won't miss those specific users that switch away to something else, but the word of mouth won't be good.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @05:35PM
I feel sad saying this, but I think that this incident, and how the forum discussion has been stopped, have permanently and irreparably damaged Pale Moon's reputation.
Firefox suffers from the same problem. It got an early reputation for being slow and bloated. Now, no matter how much work Firefox's developers put in to fixing Firefox's performance, it will always be associated with being slow and being bloated.
It doesn't take much to ruin one's reputation, as I think the Pale Moon community is now finding out.