Firefox’s Do Not Track feature is going away because websites ignore it

Pour one out. Windows Report reports that Mozilla has removed the tracking blocker in its Firefox browser. Starting with version 135 of Firefox, the “Do Not Track” setting will no longer be present in the browser.

Mozilla writes on its support page that the setting has been removed, as it simply does not work well enough anymore. “Many sites do not respect this indication of a person’s privacy preferences, and, in some cases, it can reduce privacy,” Mozilla says. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Do Not Track was developed in prototype form in 2009, amidst calls for the U.S. FTC to create just such a list to claw some privacy back from online advertisers. Firefox enabled the feature in early 2011. Other browsers soon followed, but the ad industry pushed back against the voluntary setting from the get go, and support has almost completely fizzled out in recent years.

Mozilla now directs users to use Global Privacy Control via Firefox’s new “Tell websites not to sell or share my data” setting.

Further reading: 8 compelling reasons to quit Chrome and switch to Firefox