Whitelisting while keeping every website moderately functional seems impractical for the Mozilla team, which means the burden of choosing what to allow falls on the end user.
While that's a great approach for privacy, the usability loss would probably drive the average person away from Firefox. I think the listed approach is likely best for the average user, but I think it would be nice to have an option for a power user to turn on a whitelist-only mode. (One could argue that "install an extension" is an appropriate "option" for the power user, but as you mention, it's nicer to not need to rely on third party extensions)
> Whitelisting while keeping every website moderately functional seems impractical for the Mozilla team, which means the burden of choosing what to allow falls on the end user.
I've used NoScript for a long time, and the hardest thing is knowing what the domain is doing so I can decide what to allow. It's hard to tell the difference between opaquely named ad-networks and opaquely named media player providers.
It would be nice if someone could start compiling a database that
1. groups together the domains used by different sites and services (e.g. website.com and website-images.com) and
2. includes a brief description of their purpose or business.
So, doubleclick.com and doubleclick.net could be grouped and easily identified as an ad network, google tag manager is a tracker, etc.
I doubt such a list would take any more effort to maintain than the current ad-blocker lists.
While that's a great approach for privacy, the usability loss would probably drive the average person away from Firefox. I think the listed approach is likely best for the average user, but I think it would be nice to have an option for a power user to turn on a whitelist-only mode. (One could argue that "install an extension" is an appropriate "option" for the power user, but as you mention, it's nicer to not need to rely on third party extensions)