The "pressure from advertisers" came after the feature was turned off because it didn't work right: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570630#c15

We're also investigating a different approach of double-keying cookies with the primary and 3rd-party domains, which has the advantage of preventing advertisers from correlating your visits across sites within a session. This breaks even more legitimate things (as Opera also found when they experimented with this) so we're still brainstorming.

That is not how SafeBrowsing works. Firefox downloads a large database of hash prefixes. If the hashes of the domain and url are not in the list you go to the site and nothing is sent to Google. If the first bit of the hash matches an entry in the list Firefox asks Google for the list of complete hashes that start with that prefix. If the site's hash matches then you're blocked, if it doesn't you're not, but nothing more is sent.

To further obfuscate things, when Firefox finds a prefix match it doesn't just ask for the hashes matching that prefix, it also asks for the hashes matching a couple other random prefixes from the list.

Google may still know all the sites you visit through cookies on google-analytics or AdSense, but they're not getting that information from SafeBrowsing.

Firefox was an early adopter of the <a ping> HTML 5 feature to solve exactly this redirect-for-tracking issue, added in early 2006: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319368 There was huge controversy that the feature helped sites track users (never mind that you're being tracked as it is, and that the feature let you turn it off) and it was disabled before it ever shipped. We thus continue trudging through redirect hell when the browser could have been doing that for us in parallel while giving us the content we wanted.

The feature would have sold better if it was framed as <a shortcut> or <a dest>. That is, keep the historical href behavior jumping through redirects in old browsers, while new browsers could just load the final content directly from the shortcut (or dest) attribute and treat href as the ping. I'm sure that suggestion gives HTML purist fits on semantic grounds. At least it's backward compatible unlike ping which requires a site to choose between serving different content to old and new browsers, forgoing link tracking on old browsers (the majority? fat chance), or not supporting the feature at all (we have a winner!).

URL-shorteners are a different use-case altogether and not served by <a ping>

A public benefit corporation wholly owned by a non-profit foundation. If you don't think this approach furthers the mission please let us know.

Really? So what are these, then? https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6/SHA1SUMS

We don't advertise it because anyone competent to check SHA1 hashes should be able to check PGP signatures, and the mirror network scales unlike hosting everything ourselves. Obviously the SSL server is not mirrored because giving out the cert would make it pointless.

Much better to use the Add-on Compatibility Reporter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/15003

It will enable all your officially incompatible addons just like the pref, and you can help by reporting your add-ons as working fine or not compatible (reporting is completely optional).

The Mozilla Corporation pays taxes on everything it earns just like every other taxable corporation. It is not allowed to share money back with the Foundation or risk costing the Foundation its non-profit status.

It _does_ work unless you hit some bug (and there have been some that affect some people). If you were an early adopter in particular there were some database corruption issues. If that's the case deleting the places database is often the best fix (especially if there's nothing in there you care about -- you're clearing private data, right?). Instructions at http://support.mozilla.com/ for this and other common problems.

The other issue is that the url bar shows both history and bookmarks. Obviously people don't want to clear their bookmarks so some data still shows up even after clearing history. This issue has been addressed in Firefox 3.5 with an option to not show bookmarks in the URL bar (on the Privacy tab in Options).

Firefox 3.5 is _not_ vulnerable to this attack.