Could the Firefox ping attribute be a privacy concern or nothing to worry about at all?

I’ve been meaning to blog about a new web platform feature that we’ve added to trunk builds of Firefox. It is now possible to define a ping attribute on anchor and area tags. When a user follows a link via one of these tags, the browser will send notification pings to the specified URLs after following the link.

I’m sure this may raise some eye-brows among privacy conscious folks, but please know that this change is being considered with the utmost regard for user privacy. The point of this feature is to enable link tracking mechanisms commonly employed on the web to get out of the critical path and thereby reduce the time required for users to see the page they clicked on. Many websites will employ redirects to have all link clicks on their site first go back to them so they can know what you are doing and then redirect your browser to the site you thought you were going to. The net result is that you end up waiting for the redirect to occur before your browser even begins to load the site that you want to go to. This can have a significant impact on page load performance. [Read the rest]