I cannot understand how a justification of this is possible.
Everybody hates ads. I hate them passionately. They waste CPU power, electricity, battery, bandwidth, increase loading times, assault the viewer’s eyes and ears without consent. They can risk serious malware. They are one of leading causes, if not THE leading cause of violated privacy over the internet via tracking. This is EXTREMELY malicious. How is this worse than using some CPU power?
Why does society tolerate obnoxious ads? Because they are a monetisation model for websites. That is the only reason. It is obviously provably the case that this applies to cryptomining. See https://web.archive.org/web/20190218085400/https://www.thehopepage.org/ and The Pirate Bay which warn users before mining even begins.
Please explain.
Mining does not need to violate your privacy and can be completely innocuous to users, as demonstrated by mining malware that goes undetected by users. People have a knee-jerk reaction to such malware without using any further thinking whatsoever about how to use these methods for positive change.
Cryptocurrency and browser-mining are obviously in their infancy so it is not valid to argue that “most of the use-cases are malicious so we should snuff out the practice”. New technologies that could cause positive change should be encouraged and facilitated.
Right now I am blocking reddit JavaScript from domains amazon-adsystem.com and aaxads.com that are no doubt trying to track my behaviour, so likely I will be censored for even posing this question.
Source about firefox plans to add cryptomining blocking: https://web.archive.org/web/20190218085400/https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/mozilla-adding-cryptomining-and-fingerprint-blocking-to-firefox/
u/yoasif
Mozilla agrees.
Mozilla agrees.
This is the reason that Mozilla isn’t blocking ads but is working to defuse trackers in Firefox - it believes that ads are a legitimate monetization engine for the web, but thinks that tracking is not.
As far as cryptomining, my feeling is that it may simply be because if Mozilla doesn’t do it, people will think Firefox slows down their machine/heats up their machine/lowers their battery life and won’t want to use it.
It is a balance, and my guess is that Mozilla just thinks that the trade-off isn’t worth it.