Links in Firefox to phone home when clicked on?

Firefox developer Darin Fisher has made an post to his blog about an interesting new feature that's just been added to development builds: There is now a "ping" attribute that can be added to links that can be used to specify a server that will be notified every time the link is clicked on. Of course privacy concerns immediately spring to mind, but Fisher argues that the aim is to "enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see the page they clicked on" and to make click-tracking more transparent to the user by eliminating current tracking techniques that are often hidden from the user. He says that in future builds the statusbar will warn the user when a link has a ping URL, and presumably there will be an option to turn of pinging entirely. Head over to Darin's blog and be sure to check out the lively discussion in the comments, or take a look at the specification from WhatWG.

[Via Slashdot]

Tags: opensource