Firefox Will Block Navigational Data URIs as Part of an Anti-Phishing Feature (bleepingcomputer.com)

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: Mozilla will soon block the loading of data URIs in the Firefox navigation bar as part of a crackdown on phishing sites that abuse this protocol. The data: URI scheme (RFC 2397) was deployed in 1998 when developers were looking for ways to embed files in other files. What they came up with was the data: URI scheme that allows a developer to load a file represented as an ASCII-encoded octet stream inside another document. Since then, the URI scheme has become very popular with website developers as it allows them to embed text-based (CSS or JS) files or image (PNG, JPEG) files inside HTML documents instead of loading each resource via a separate HTTP request. This practice became hugely popular because search engines started ranking websites based on their page loading speed and the more HTTP requests a website made, the slower it loaded, and the more it affected a site's SERP position.

Comments

What?

[DontBeAMoran]

Why do they always need to re-invent the wheel? Why can't they use RFC 3514 like everybody else?

A Better Headline

[darkain]

A better headline is actually a paragraph header half way through TFA:

"Firefox joins Chrome and Edge in blocking navigational data URIs"

So basically Firefox is simply implementing what is already standard practice otherwise on competing browsers.