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

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.

Comments

e-commerce

[SumDog]

I worked in e-commerce once. Our client had fifteen tracking pixels in the final page of the checkout process! It added a good 10 ~ 20 seconds to that page. That was on top of all the Adobe Omniture garbage.

I refused to pulled crazy triple shifts after I the Thanksgiving break and was let go. I was so glad. It was totally not worth it and unemployment felt awesome after all that rubbish.

Also, fuck TOMS shoes!

Re: e-commerce

[Anonymous Coward]

It all comes down to trust. People who track you don't trust each other. They'd fake data, so why wouldn't you? They want first hand to the real data, before it's faked and pumped and fluffed to look like it actually is beneficial. And they don't trust the site provider to be honest either, so they can't have the tracking data stored with the site itself.

Bullshit ...

[gstoddart]

I'm going to call complete bullshit on this.

Because disabling 3rd party cookies and setting cookies to "ask before setting" will probably also have the same effect, because once you hit a site you've said "no" to, you never get asked again.

This is saying "our awesome tracking protection is faster than promiscuously accepting all cookies and running scripts".

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.

And it's a setting which Mozilla backed down on enabling by default because advertisers whined at them.

A little late

[Runaway1956]

I've already switched to Pale Moon, in part because Pale Moon loads sites much faster. I also benefit from reduced CPU usage, from about 60% to about 15%. Memory usage has also dropped, although less dramatically than CPU usage.

HELLO FIREFOX!! You started life being the leanest, meanest, most efficient browser in the world! It's time to get back to your roots!

Re: Think that's impressive?

[pspahn]

It's amazing how incompetent and lazy Web developers have become.

As a developer myself, I feel the need to stand up on this statement.

I have built numerous e-commerce sites. Every one of them performed well and care was taken to reduce HTTP requests, optimize images, minify assets, etc. I do this because it's the right thing to do and I take pride in building something that works well.

Then the site gets turned over to the client and gets managed by SEO and marketing people. I will usually check the site out or show it to a friend or something a month or two after launch. I am disgusted (but never surprised) to see the slow page loads and poor response times that are a result of all the additional tracking garbage they stuff in the header.

I see a lot of people blame web developers for sites that perform poorly. Every single time I have had a hand in building one of those sites, the developer was never the person responsible for that stuff.