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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @08:22PM (2 children)
You are missing a possible motivation on the side of the Palemoon devs though. Palemoon is a young project with a small userbase. It's mostly compatible to Firefox with regard to rendering HTML, yet it transmits its own User Agent string. This causes problems with some websites, causing site operators additional work if they want to support Palemoon.
If the impression arises that a significant portion of Palemoon users are not just adblocking, but actively sabotaging ad networks, motivation to support Palemoon amongst site operators in bed with the ad networks will... shall we say "drop off"? A cliff?
This in turn would worsen the user experience of newly won over Palemoon users who don't know about the technicalities of browser switches on the server side or how to spoof the UA string. So I'd say from their perspective, this is about self preservation to at least have a chance to grow their user base.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday August 28 2017, @08:42PM (1 child)
So.... this plugin doesn't work in Chrome, Firefox, Edge/IE, Opera, or Safari? I'm not sure why Pale Moon would be singled out over the others, unless this plugin is targeting Pale Moon specifically, which would be weird.
That's a good reason you've brought up. If it was the true motivations, why not elucidate on the website for all us to understand? It's still allowed, but the default Pale Moon policy is to block it in order to still receive support from major site operators. THAT is something the user base can understand, debate, and process. I get it, and I'm fully committed to absolute fucking war against Big Data & Big Advertising.
We were given the bullshit of indirect or direct damages to site operators from fighting tracking and advertising, which happens on ALL PLATFORMS. Yes, it's a possible motivation, and one that Pale Moon has not felt it needs to confirm or deny. Since we are not hearing that from Pale Moon, I need to fall back to what I can understand from their statements. Those simply point to Pale Moon cuddling the balls of Big Data & Big Advertising, while deriding their collective enemies.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @11:26PM
I would wager that a large portion of Palemoon users right now have actually switched from Firefox because they don't like the direction Mozilla is taking, cuddling up to Big Data and Big Content.
It's reasonable to assume that many of these early adopters are authorities on tech matters within their social networks of less tech-savvy friends. If they recommend to their friends "try Palemoon with such and such extensions" and all those extensions but AdNauseam install without a hitch, said friends will probably forget all about it and still be happy.
With that in mind, there's bound to be a huge wave of Firefox users asking their tech friends about a possible replacement once Mozilla breaks compatibility with most existing extensions.
On the upside, this is the first time I've heard about AdNauseam. Been a Palemoon user for some time and will try out AdNauseam thanks to the Palemoon devs giving it some publicity :)