Mozilla's approach shows there may be room in the debate for compromise, that strikes a balance between user privacy and advertising. In time, Nguyen said, he hopes that advertisers and publishers will learn to adapt their advertising to the tracking block standards and design products that serve the needs of both consumers and companies.
"It's not that we're trying to build something that blocks all advertising, he said. "If people could get everything for free that's the choice they would make. But we don't want that." What Mozilla does want, he said, is for the Internet to continue to grow.
Recent stirrings from the advertising industry indicate that companies are clearly hearing consumer frustrations with ads. In a recent blog post, the Interactive Advertising Bureau admitted that the industry had "messed up" the Web by overloading it with large, occasionally invasive ads. In response, the IAB announced a new LEAN ads program - for Light, Encrypted, Ad-choice supported and Non-invasive.
Look back to pop-up blocking, that didn't kill all advertising.
Nguyen is confident that the Firefox tracking blocker - with its clear guidelines about what's allowed and what's not - can speed along a change for the better.
"Look back to pop-up blocking," he said. "That didn't kill all advertising, just that which users didn't want to see."
The new version of Firefox, with the tracking blocker, is available for download starting Tuesday. Users will have the option to turn it on or off, as they do with private browsing. Nguyen said that the non-profit expects that the audiences for both services would be similar.
But when asked how many of the browser's users that might be, he said that Firefox doesn't actually track how many people use its privacy-focused features.
