Despite complaints from advertisers, Mozilla is moving ahead with its plans to block tracking in its Firefox Web browser. Mozilla announced Wednesday that it would work with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford to develop the Cookie Clearinghouse, a tool for browsers that uses lists to manage the blocking of third-party cookies.

Cookies track the websites a user visits and deliver this information to third-party advertisers. Some cookies are great for shopping, social media and news websites, so Mozilla doesn’t want to simply block all of them in Firefox. Cookie Clearinghouse would make it easy for Firefox users to choose which websites to give permission to install cookies.

The technology proposed for Firefox is similar to Apple’s Safari browser, which blocks all cookies from sites that users don’t intentionally visit. Mozilla said it has refined the technology so that some third-party cookies are allowed, under certain circumstances. Mozilla also wants to limit cookies from intentionally visited websites so that Firefox users won’t be tracked after they leave a website.

Advertisers use cookies for lucrative targeted ads. Twenty percent of the world’s computers use Firefox, and advertisers claim that losing the ability to track them will severely disrupt Internet commerce. They want Mozilla to changes or even abandon the feature in Firefox entirely.

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