Comment As a developer, I understand why it defaults on (Score 1) 575
Think this through. No site is going to totally drop outbound click tracking via the old redirect-chaining in favor of this.
It only works in firefox, and only when turned on.
If I were to support it, as a developer, I would set up a 'ping sniffer' on the home page, with a 'ping' attribute to all links. It would track to a page on the site who's only purpose is to add a 'visitorSupportsPing' attribute to the visitor's session cookie. Note that this is only done on the home page, and only when the attribute does not already exist.
From then on, I can dynamically emit either redirect-chained links, or ping-tracked links based on what the client supports.
From that point on, EVERY visitor will still be tracked, it's just their choice to enable ping-tracking and save themselves the redirect. If cookies are disabled, they just get the old redirect-chained method.
One last note. No high-volume site is going to bother to do this, unless it's with a high-performance isapi/nsapi/httphandler filter. The performance hit otherwise would just be too high.
It only works in firefox, and only when turned on.
If I were to support it, as a developer, I would set up a 'ping sniffer' on the home page, with a 'ping' attribute to all links. It would track to a page on the site who's only purpose is to add a 'visitorSupportsPing' attribute to the visitor's session cookie. Note that this is only done on the home page, and only when the attribute does not already exist.
From then on, I can dynamically emit either redirect-chained links, or ping-tracked links based on what the client supports.
From that point on, EVERY visitor will still be tracked, it's just their choice to enable ping-tracking and save themselves the redirect. If cookies are disabled, they just get the old redirect-chained method.
One last note. No high-volume site is going to bother to do this, unless it's with a high-performance isapi/nsapi/httphandler filter. The performance hit otherwise would just be too high.
