"The road to hell is paved with good intentions".

It reminds me a whole lot of Do Not Track, which also had good intentions, but ended up just introducing yet another vector to use for fingerprinting.

I also disagree with the claim that internet ads inherently require tracking.

No other form of advertising provides direct feedback about someone's interests or the products someone purchased after seeing or hearing an ad.

Advertising can be unidirectional, it doesn't need tracking.

"In today's age, advertising has become a necessary evil for an Internet-focused organization to stay in business"
Can't agree. Lots of true FOSS has no ads.

The thing is, the only thing Firefox *truly* has going for it is it doesn't do the Google crap. By... doing the google crap, it basically means we're all stuck with no truly viable major browsers anymore.

Which is a good reminder that we never should have let it get to the point there were only two real browsers.

I'm normally opposed to opt-out, and I hate ads. But I hate even more that ads are not ads, they're tracking devices.

I totally get that websites cost money, and those who make the sites and the content should be able to get paid, so if there's a privacy preserving way to serve ads, it's better to implement it than not to. And it's true that no one would opt in to this thing.

So I was thinking that, in my totally non-expert and unsolicited opinion, the best situation would be to make it opt out but PROMINENTLY show the user how to do so along with why they might consider giving the new way a chance.

"In today's age, advertising has become a necessary evil for an Internet-focused organization to stay in business"

I don't see any advertising on the fediverse. Do you? Necessary evil my ass 🤡