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Chrome, Safari and Opera Criticised For Removing Privacy Setting (sophos.com)
It's a browser feature few users will have heard of, but forthcoming versions of Chrome, Safari and Opera are in the process of removing the ability to disable a long-ignored tracking feature called hyperlink auditing pings. From a report: This is a long-established HTML feature that's set as an attribute -- the ping variable -- which turns a link into a URL that can be tracked by website owners or advertisers to monitor what users are clicking on. When a user follows a link set up to work like this, an HTTP POST ping is sent to a second URL which records this interaction without revealing to the user that this has happened. It's only one of several ways users can be tracked, of course, but it's long bothered privacy experts, which is why third-party adblockers often include it on their block list by default.
Until now, an even simpler way to block these pings has been through the browser itself, which in the case of Chrome, Safari and Opera is done by setting a flag (in Chrome you type chrome://flags and set hyperlink auditing to 'disabled'). Notice, however, that these browsers still allow hyperlink auditing by default, which means users would need to know about this setting to change that. It seems that very few do.
Until now, an even simpler way to block these pings has been through the browser itself, which in the case of Chrome, Safari and Opera is done by setting a flag (in Chrome you type chrome://flags and set hyperlink auditing to 'disabled'). Notice, however, that these browsers still allow hyperlink auditing by default, which means users would need to know about this setting to change that. It seems that very few do.
... and made Firefox lift its game out of complacency, but it is long past the time to return to FF.
I'm not sure why you think those three browsers are repackaged versions of each other. Apple forked WebKit in 2010 as WebKit2 for use in Safari, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. Google forked WebKit in 2013 as Blink for use in Chromium/Chrome, and hasn't used WebKit proper since it made the switch. In the last few years, Chromium has been adopted by Opera and Microsoft, but Safari—despite having started at the same place that Chrome started—today remains on a different foundation. That Safari is making this change at the same time as the others is due to political/corporate maneuvering, not technical changes.
Also, while there are valid arguments to be made against a browser monoculture—a problem that WebKit-based browsers are contributing to—that doesn't mean that the rendering engines themselves are bad. Far from it, I think most people would agree that on their technical merits, WebKit-based engines are among the best we have, and certainly aren't bad enough to justify your vitriolic frothing against them.