From the ‘I like to eat cookies, not save them’ files:
More than a year and a half after Mozilla first led the way by promoting Do Not Track (DNT) technology for Firefox 4. Google is now finally on-board too, with the Chrome 23 release.
The basic idea with DNT is it gives users the choice to either allow or block sites from tracking them. Seems like an obvious and easy enough idea – and frankly I have not idea why it has taken so long to implement.
Oh wait, maybe I do.
Google owns ad networks that track people.
So, if Google doesn’t allow those networks and the sites they run on to track, that could cost them money. Yeaah, sure Google is doing the right thing now by implementing DNT, but I’m still a little skeptical about their larger motives. I have no such skepticism with Firefox’s DNT, since they don’t have a multi-million dollar ad revenue based model to protect.
Security
Chrome 23 isn’t just about DNT though, it also implements GPU accelerated video decoding which ends up improving battery life, according to Google.
In terms of security, 15 vulnerabilities have been patched with Google paying out at least $9,000 in security awards to researchers.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.