Did they think nobody would notice?
Very unlikely, they’re doing it openly and they know from experience that all changes are always immediately reported in the community. They operate this way by choice.
Are they going back to the bad old habit of removing features just for the sake of removing features?
Doubt it, DNT is not only useless it is misleading as the user may think it is effective while in reality it allows “better” fingerprinting.
Did the fact that so many of their users have that flag set interfere with their ad tracking ambitions?
Source? I thought reports had usually been that it saw extremely low adoption on the client but maybe I’m wrong. Best rates I could find was <9% on desktop and 19% on mobile but that’s back when it was most talked about.
If “do not track” was already in use by 10-20% of Firefox users a year after it became available, at a guess I’d say maybe it got to at least 20-30% over time, considering how popular the idea became in the years following that. But let me know if you find actual data I guess, that might be interesting.
At any rate, having to refrain from tracking ad attribution by default for even just 10% of users would be a substantial cost in the future where that system becomes a big source of revenue.
I’m not saying that’s their motivation, just that it seems roughly plausible that it might be, in the absence of a better explanation.
