Turn Tracking Protection on in Firefox to Load Pages 44% Faster
Even if you don’t care about the privacy implications of tracking cookies and other technologies that sites use to identify us on the Internet, you can still turn on Tracking Protection in Firefox to potentially significantly improve speed.
Former Mozilla Software Engineer Monica Chu and Computer Science Researcher Georgios Contaxis reviewed top 200 news sites (as measured by Alexa) and found an average 44% reduction in page load times and a 39% reduction in data usage when Advanced Tracking Protection was enabled …
Tracking protection actively blocks domains known to track users. You may not see huge performance benefits across all sites, depending on how much each site relies on third-party content and similar add-ons from tracking domains. However, with a range of 20% to 90% faster page load times – and better privacy controls – it’s worth a try, according to research.
To enable Tracking Protection in Firefox:
- Type about: config in the address bar and press Enter.
- You will see a warning about a possible void of the warranty. Hit “I’ll be careful, I promise!” continue.
- Search for privacy.trackingprotection.enabled .
- Double click on it to change the value to true.
You can read the researchers’ article (PDF) here .
Tracking Protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 Security and Privacy 2015 | Monica at Mozilla via Venture Beat and Boing Boing