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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.

27 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. e-commerce by SumDog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re: e-commerce by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. 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.
    3. Re: e-commerce by amiga3D · · Score: 2

      I installed little snitch on a fresh install of Yosemite on my Mac recently. When I started up Firefox and went surfing I had to spend almost 20 minutes blocking tracing sites so I never see the bitches. I do it at that level instead of trusting Firefox to do it. I was amazed how much bullshit is out there.

  2. 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
    4. Re: Think that's impressive? by pspahn · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
  3. Faster! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Wow slashdot now loads faster!

  4. Bullshit ... by gstoddart · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
    1. 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.

    2. Re:Bullshit ... by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      It's not bullshit, it's an ex-Mozilla employee discussing just how bad the situation is.

      Fair enough, but TFS makes it sound like this is a speedup due to how super awesome the tracking protection is, as opposed to the default crap of letting everything from a zillion other domains run by default.

      Run everything from every cross domain crap and advertising the crux of the problem here, because ads and other tracking crap have fucked up the internet to the point that dozens of other domains get to know every page you visit.

      Those entities, and the people whose websites use them, should not be rewarded for putting shit all over the internet.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    3. 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.

    4. 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.

  5. Re:Lets all chant together by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Informative

    + NoScript + Ghostery + AdBlock + Block 3rd Party Cookies

    For Chrome: ScriptSafe + Chostery + HTTP SwitchBoard + Disconnect

    The internet is full of shit which needs to be ruthlessly blocked.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  6. A little late by Runaway1956 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:A little late by Runaway1956 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Uhhhhh - Pale Moon is not Firefox, and it hasn't been for some time. It is a fork, unlike some other Firefox copycats. I remember FasterFox, which simply took each new version of Firefox, and recompiled it with their own tweaks. That is not the case with Pale Moon. The code has been altered to suit a different vision, and they no longer even try to recompile new FF versions. Pale Moon is a complete break with Firefox.

      --
      "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
  7. Re:Lets all chant together by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 2

    + NoScript + Ghostery + AdBlock + Block 3rd Party Cookies

    For Chrome: ScriptSafe + Chostery + HTTP SwitchBoard + Disconnect

    The internet is full of shit which needs to be ruthlessly blocked.

    Safersurfing for persistent cookies not stored in the usual places.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  8. 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.]

  9. Re:How to block Google analytics by Runaway1956 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  10. 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

  11. 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.

    1. Re:Seems to work for OSM and Wikipedia by Em+Adespoton · · Score: 2

      But how about more specialized websites (such as Slashdot) or non-essential relaxation websites (YouTube for the most part)? Would people really bother to chuck in donations if there were no advertisements?

      http://news.slashdot.org/story...

      http://slashdot.org/faq/subscr...

      The answer appears to be "yes".

  12. Re:How to block Google analytics by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

    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.

  13. Re:Lets all chant together by firewrought · · Score: 3, Informative

    And under Firefox, don't forget to tweak your about:config:

    dom.storage.enabled = false # DOM storage is cookies reborn
    plugins.enumerable_names = "" # Useful for fingerprinting
    network.http.sendRefererHeader = 0
    network.http.sendSecureXSiteReferrer = false
    geo.enabled=false
    general.useragent.override = "???" # May not be worth it.

    If you don't need them, WebGL and WebRTC are just big security holes:

    webgl.disabled=true
    media.peerconnection.enabled=false

    Not privacy-related, but...

    network.prefetch-next = false # Don't load pages without asking (esp. at work)
    network.http.pipelining = true # Improve load performance.

    --
    -1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
  14. Re:Ghostery and adblock by CauseBy · · Score: 2

    Ghostery is awesome. I was a longtime AdBlock Plus user but I switched to uBlock based on a recommendation from a bigger nerd than I am, and I have found uBlock to be better in all the claimed ways. Check it out.