Yup, it's true. Firefox 128 includes new adtech features that are opt-in by default and announced with very little fanfare, so most people might not even know they're there. :blobcatverysad:

Well, this is me telling you they're there. You might want to go ahead and take a minute to opt out.

Here's the little helpful explainer from Mozilla about how it all works:

support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/p

My read seems to be: Mozilla says website surveillance is generally bad and should be defended against. Cool. No notes. Firefox actually has a lot of nice anti-tracking and privacy features there and that's the main reason why I like Firefox.

But, and I swear I'm not even joking a little bit here, Mozilla goes on to say that advertisers might be happier if Firefox itself just tracked you directly and sent activity reports back to them.

Doesn't that sound great?

Now, to Mozilla's credit, they claim to anonymize the activity reports. And you can still meaningfully opt out of the whole system.

But WTF, mate?! I use Firefox *because* it fights against adtech. Or at least it used to. Now, Mozilla just lets adtech right in the front door and hopes you won't notice? :blobcat_thisisfine:

Well, we noticed. Mozilla is damage and we need to route around it.

@cuchaz
Okay, it looks like I'm staying on FF 118.2.0 on my Android and Windows devices — the last release to have a preference to disable WebP support, and on 124 on my Linux boxes — on which I could patch the option to disable WebP back in and build it myself, building FF for Android and Windows seems like going into too much trouble.
After 124 my userChrome.css hacks started breaking and I stopped updating — now I see that it's not even worth it. Thanks for bringing this to attention!

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@bohwaz
Some think that I go way over the top, but I want to have as little Google in my life as possible. I do not consider it an open format: it only has one widely used implementation — the one developed and wholly controlled by Google.
I don't think we should depend on Google for codecs too, especially ones providing minimal compression benefits.
Now that JPEG XL and AV1 exist — better both compression-wise and in terms of governance, I see no point in adopting either WebP or VP9.

@cuchaz

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