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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!
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.
Wow slashdot now loads faster!
+ 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.