Jeremiah Grossman: Internet Explorer 9 ad blocking via “Tracing Protection” — no means yes..
Last week, the FTC issued a report recommending Congress implement Do-Not-Track legislation to help protect consumer privacy. This week, Microsoft detailed Do-Not-Track” options in the upcoming Internet Explorer 9. Coincidence? Doubtful.
No way Microsoft slammed out the code from scratch in a few short days because the FTC made some recommendation. The IE team clearly saw ad blocking as a good idea despite what they told us before and had ad blocking, errr I mean Tracking Protection, ready to go. Only they might not have had the juice to include it because of the aforementioned road blocks.
Will Mozilla make AdBlock Plus a standard feature of Firefox? AdBlock Plus is the top download in the Privacy & Security category with overd over 100 million downloads. It has over 8 million daily active users and a 5 star rating with over 2,000 reviews.
Will Mozilla try to match or exceed Microsoft? How will Google react?
Are we going to see a major shift in Internet advertising so it’s more akin to email marketing?
I think we’re witnessing the beginning of a whole new chapter in the ongoing browser war. Now we must ask, when and if Mozilla is going to add the functionality of their #1 extension natively into their browser? How can they now not do so? Can Firefox’s market-share position afford Internet Explorer to be more advanced in privacy protection features? We’ll have to wait and see what they say or do. I’m hopeful they’ll come around as Microsoft did. Even more interesting will be how Google reacts. AdBlock is their most popular add-on as well. The bottom line is these are very good signs for everyone on the Web.
