Philosophically, this effort seems fallacious to me. Many of the Internet's services are only free because of advertising, and while Mozilla's intentions seem admirable, they're at best short sighted and at worst naive.
As for the immediate reason Mozilla is backing off, have you ever wondered how you make money as a browser? One of the key revenue streams for a company like Mozilla or Opera is referral fees from search engines. Ever wonder why Microsoft is so desperate to make it difficult to use non-IE browsers? it's because they have their own search engine.
My own personal speculation is that some of Mozilla's search engine customers, whose business model often includes using cookies, came forward and indicated their displeasure with this initiative and pointed out that this would basically amount to biting the hand that feeds it on Mozilla's part.
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Philosophically, this effort seems fallacious to me. Many of the Internet's services are only free because of advertising, and while Mozilla's intentions seem admirable, they're at best short sighted and at worst naive.
As for the immediate reason Mozilla is backing off, have you ever wondered how you make money as a browser? One of the key revenue streams for a company like Mozilla or Opera is referral fees from search engines. Ever wonder why Microsoft is so desperate to make it difficult to use non-IE browsers? it's because they have their own search engine.
My own personal speculation is that some of Mozilla's search engine customers, whose business model often includes using cookies, came forward and indicated their displeasure with this initiative and pointed out that this would basically amount to biting the hand that feeds it on Mozilla's part.