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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 28 2017, @08:25PM (1 child)
I think that this extension blocking could actually cause Pale Moon itself to be considered "malware" under your definition.
Based on the linked to forum discussion, a lot of Pale Moon users do not consider this extension blocking to be in their interest.
These users also didn't ask for this extension blocking to happen, and don't consent to it happening.
So if Pale Moon is not doing what users do want it to do (ie allowing them to use whatever extensions they want, without being blocked) and is doing what the user's don't want it to do (ie blocking extensions that the users want to use), then I think it does fit the definition you gave.
(Score: 2) by Virindi on Wednesday August 30 2017, @01:38AM
Seems reasonable. Unfortunately, among many browsers, PM may be the least of many evils.
Blocking extensions that do what they say is definitely not something I would do in my own software if I had the choice, but I do need a web browser and all the useful choices seem to come with a pile of BS attached. Right now I am using a build of FF that comes with "Pocket" and I am not happy about that either (though it seems Mozilla genuinely intended for Pocket to be useful for users so that is a different category).