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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.

10 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Think that's impressive? by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Add adblocking on top of that and you will double those numbers.

    The advertising industry is ruining the internet.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
    1. Re:Think that's impressive? by Rob+Y. · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yes, the public has 'spoken', and the Internet shall be ad-supported and otherwise 'free'. That doesn't mean that internet advertising has to be as intrusive as possible - just because it can be. Certain kinds of internet advertising is probably effective enough without tracking your every move. Even Google was pretty good - and financially successful - when it simply tracked your search queries and used aggregated data to produce good search results. The results may be marginally 'better' (i.e. personalized) today, but that's got plusses and minues. In any case, I wonder how much more revenue personalized searches generate for Google than before. You still have to click on the ads for them to make their money...

      As far as other sites go, I imagine they're all sitting on huge troves of tracking data that they can't begin to figure out a use for - except maybe to sell it to somebody else which Google itself does not do, btw.

      --
      Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
    2. Re:Think that's impressive? by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 5, Insightful

      No what will happen is shitty sites full of fluff and click bait will go out of business. Nothing of value will be lost.

    3. Re:Think that's impressive? by JamesTRexx · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Static advertising.

      No more audiovisually distracting intrusive advertising burning bandwidth and CPU to peddle things you've already bought or looked into.
      Newspapers and magazines had people managing advertising themselves, picking relevant products and the way it's presented. Why can't websites manage it like they do and take responsibility for it?

      --
      home
  2. Re:Bullshit ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not bullshit, it's an ex-Mozilla employee discussing just how bad the situation is. Turns out Mozilla don't have the clout to fix the situation without resorting to compromises we wish they wouldn't have to, but it's not bullshit. Just try it out yourself.

  3. Re:Nice timing... by JMJimmy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    True. I'd still like a fork that is DRM-free and doesn't advertise to me and a million other things. For those that want to enable it:

    privacy.trackingprotection.enabled = true

  4. Seems to work for OSM and Wikipedia by pereric · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, Wikipedia seems to work pretty fine without commercial ads (they do some fundraising sometime). And Open Streetmap seems to do fine, as are the plethora of services built upon it. Sometimes NGO:s and individuals do stuff and share it just because they want it done. Finding sponsorship or donations for the hosting fees are a minor problem then.

  5. Re: e-commerce by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What I can not understand is why aren't there a unified solution to provide tracking data to all different underlying tracking systems.

    Because there's more than one set of greedy bastards, each of which have their own branding, and feel they deserve a slice of the pie -- because they all have executives who need hooker and yacht money.

    Are you expecting greedy advertisers to pool their resources so users only see a single greedy embedded in their web pages? Or that somehow having the big giant clearinghouse of everyone's data would somehow be good?

    I have an alternative, block the shit out of all of them, and then nuke the offices of tracking and advertising companies from orbit.

    Just because a bunch of advertising agencies thinks they own the internet doesn't mean we should play along. In fact, we should try to weed them out entirely.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  6. Re:Bullshit ... by tburkhol · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts ... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts

    When Newegg includes a 1px image from criteo.com, criteo is no longer a 3rd party. When newegg directs "promotions.newegg.com" to edgesuite.net, then edgesuite is no longer a 3rd party (and in a way that is much more difficult for even clever ad blocking software to detect).

    The point they're trying to raise here is that including all of those web-bugs and their associated cookies does impact the visitor experience, and FF has a system to reduce it. You can take this from the user perspective: here's an easy way to speed up the web, without having to figure out which of the adblocking plug ins are really legit. You can look at it from the host perspective: if web bugs make your whole web site feel much slower, then maybe the analytics aren't worth it. There are a lot of people who just don't think about why their internet is slow. Every time someone stands up and says it takes longer to load all the ads on most pages than the actual content, a few more people will understand the cost of "free' web pages.

  7. Re:Bullshit ... by tlhIngan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The slowness comes from letting 3rd party tracking sites set cookies and run scripts ... which modern browsers seem to treat as the default, or letting any crap set cookies or run scripts.

    Their tracking protection isn't magic, it's just blocking crap. Some of which can be blocked by default anyway.

    Well, the reason it's faster is you avoid making extraneous HTTP connections which can be slow by slow servers.

    A lot of ad and tracking servers stall out the browser, and because everyone uses them, they're overloaded. The browser might have everything it needs to render the page, but all the tracking stuff stalls out the renderer so you get only the headers. You can easily increase the speed if you tell the renderer to ignore those tracking objects and the network stack to not retrieve that content.

    Slow ad servers are the bane of the internet - why ad companies don't purchase more bandwidth and capacity is beyond me.