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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.
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!
...but I already have Ghostery for that, so it doesn't offset the news about ads in the default home page.
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.
RequestPolicy
Wow slashdot now loads faster!
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Yes, you're running to much stuff. Each of them requires CPU cycles. Drop Ad Block Plus, and install uBlock. I saw a rather dramatic drop in system resources with that alone. Keep Better Privacy, and Privacy Badger - drop Ghostery. Agent spoofer I'm not sure about - I tried it, and dropped it. Self destructing cookies? Why bother? Firefox has a session cookie setting, just use that.
But, most assuredly, overlapping security precautions will slow the system down. Perhaps if you're running a state of the art octo-core with 32 gig of memory, that slowdown is unnoticeable. If you're running an ancient piece of 32-bit hardware with only a gig of memory, it may bring you to a grinding halt.
Whatever your system, use the resources wisely.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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.]
Yes. I don't believe that you can block ALL Google stuff, but you can indeed block the GA servers. http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho... I'm to lazy to read all through it again, but I'm pretty sure that one blocks Google Analytics. If I'm wrong, you should be able to find one that does with a simple search.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
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
If you block "player.ooyala.com", the page loads much faster. Turns out I'm blocking some analytic tracking thing.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Blocking google-analytics.com doesn't work ?
Anyways, If you want to block all ads with ABP, just uncheck the very obvious checkbox in the settings, or use an alternative blocker like uBlock.
If you are paranoid about the blocker sending data to their company, know that ABP is an opensource project, so is uBlock, you are free to analyse the code and build it yourself. But considering the controversy about ABP, I guess serveral people alredy did this.
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.
See, the problem is that the religious conservatives want other religious conservatives to have the privilege of being able to spout their hateful bile without any consequences. They don't want free speech, they want consequences-free speech for their own kind (but no one else).
and Adblock plus is simply a front company that sells the right to place adverts in front of its users.
Not a problem; don't use ABP.
Use uBlock instead. As a bonus, it's much much faster and uses far less memory.
Oh - got it. Dumb question on my part, huh? I should have figured that out.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Now, someone somewhere pays for that 100/100 connection.
It costs me all of 43 euro per month, and has no limits on capacity or ports or otherwise; that's the standard contract here. We use it for accessing web pages at various sites, including banking and shopping (cookies destroyed and cache cleared immediately afterwards). The web server is just an extra. Like the mail server and media server and file server.
It all just happens to be your hobby.
And that's precisely the point. This is the way the internet is supposed to work.
I use several anti tracking plugins and I've noticed that when I switch to a different browser without them the page load time is much faster. I also have googled safe surf turned on which blocks evil sites. In starting to think these tracking blockers and stuff slow things down. They don't really stop tracking since the blockers or google safe surf are middlemen who can track you.
Thus I would welcome a unified approach to protecting myself that was actually faster
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I heard editing your hosts file is a good way to get viruses.
Don't trust it, anyone with grammar this atrocious is obviously a Nigerian scammer.
Don't pay attention. It's basically just trolls pretending to be outraged just because mozilla decided to give the option to end users to use a 3rd party binary plug-in to handle DRM decryption in HTML5 videos.
(you know, the same way Flash, Java, Silverlight, etc. had always been plug-ins too. Except that DRM is much more restricted in what it can do, as it runs in a sand box that only allows it to work as a decryption filter).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I read the paper and it is ok (nothing groundbreaking) on the technical side. But I was shocked to see broad conclusion of political or economic nature that were not supported by any argumentation in the paper.
In particular, the first sentence of the conclusion: "The Internet’s principal revenue model leads to misaligned incentives between users, advertisers, and content providers, essentially creating a race to the bottom."
I guess we'll just take your opinion for it.
These comments are mine; I do not speak for my employer.