Just by enabling Tracking Protection in the latest version of Firefox, it is possible to make web pages load 44% faster. In addition to the reduction in loading time, it is also possible to save 39% of data usage.
Tracking Protection in Firefox is a feature that will block websites from tracing your activities, thus ensuring privacy. The feature is way better than the “Do not Track” feature. “Do not Track” tells websites not to monitor your behaviors, whereas “Tracking Protection” puts the control in your hands. Download latest version of Firefox.
Enabling Tracking Protection
1. In your Firefox browser, type about:config in the address bar and hit enter
2. Click “I’ll be careful, I promise” to continue to the advanced settings
3. Search for privacy.trackingprotection.enabled
4. Once you find the setting, just double click on it to toggle the value to true
5. Done
From now on, Firefox will effectively block sites from tracking your online activities. To disable protection for a specific site, click the “Shield icon” near the address bar and select “Disable protection for this site”
5 Reasons why you should enable “Tracking Protection”
1. 44% reduction in Page load speed
2. 39% reduction in data usage
3. Reduced number of HTTP requests and
4. Improved Privacy Protection
5. Reduced memory foot print
The Research
These numbers are the result of a recent research titled “Tracking Protection in Firefox For Privacy and Performance” by Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis of Columbia University and Former Mozilla Software Engineer Monica Chew of Mozilla Corporation.
Below is the abstract from the research paper
We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Fire-fox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users’ online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach and demonstrate a 67.5% reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set during a crawl of the Alexa top 200 news sites. Since Firefox does not download and render content from tracking domains, Tracking Protection also enjoys performance benefits of a 44% median reduction in page load time and 39% reduction in data usage in the Alexa top 200 news sites
