Thanks. I just found that page and read it, and came here to warn that Firefox is rolling it out. I’m not sure when the notice came through, but I think I remember seeing it not too long ago. It didn’t merely delay connections – it out-and-out blocked them or routed me to weird-looking web pages. The impact on smithsonianmag.org was particularly dramatic. I’m a science journalist and do a lot of research on the web, so I visit many different web sites, and this seemed to block or scramble on the order of 10% of places I tried to go in recent weeks. It was so bad that I was thinking seriously of switching from Firefox to Safari. I’m on a major carrier, Verizon FiOS, so I’m not dealing with flaky little providers. Given the impact I saw, I’m disturbed that Mozilla decided to roll out this sort of change without investigating its potential impact.
I’ll add that I’ve seen some other efforts to increase privacy and security cause collateral damage. The tracking features that we find intrusive and obnoxious also are used in securing web sites; when I blocked tracking, I started seeing more CAPTCHAs so blurry I can’t solve them.