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Firefox's Optional Tracking Protection Reduces Load Time For News Sites By 44%

Posted by Soulskill on from the definition-of-a-win-win dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis recently released a paper (PDF) that examines Firefox's optional Tracking Protection feature. The duo found that with Tracking Protection enabled, the Alexa top 200 news sites saw a 67.5 percent reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set. Furthermore, performance benefits included a 44 percent median reduction in page load time and 39 percent reduction in data usage.

1 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. For anyone else wondering what the hell this is by guises · · Score: 5, Informative

    I had to look this up. For anyone else wondering: this is one of those hidden FIrefox features which is only available to people who know about it ahead of time, through the about:config interface. If you're one of those people who isn't in the club, the boolean you search for is "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled".

    [Insert rant about FIrefox's god-awful UI and severely lacking menu system.]