Firefox's Tracking Protection Speeds Up Loading Time For Top News Websites, Optional Feature Reviewed

A paper was released by former Mozilla software engineer Monica Chew and Computer Science researcher Georgios Kontaxis regarding the optional feature of Mozilla Firefox called Tracking Protection. They found out that this option reduces the top news websites' load time to as much as 44%.

The paper was published via the blogger page of Monica Chew and aside from the reduced loading time, the top 200 news sites that were opened also reflected a 67.5% reduction in the number of HTTP cookies and 39% reduction in data usage. The 200 news sites were opened with and without the Tracking Protection being activated

Mozilla Firefox's Tracking Protection feature lets Firefox users avoid many forms of online tracking and it offers better privacy so users can enjoy sped up page loads. The Tracking Protection feature blocks the requests to tracking domains thus the huge cut back in the load time. The feature remains to be optional as Mozilla Firefox is still gathering feedback from the users.

Chew added in her paper that advertising in websites also is a huge setback for pages to load faster. She writes, "It merely externalizes the costs in a way that incentivizes malicious or incompetent players to build things like Superfish, infect 1 in 20 machines with ad injection malware, and create sites that require unsafe plugins and take twice as many resources to load, quite expensive in terms of bandwidth, power, and stability."

This is not the first time that the Tracking Protection feature was reviewed as Chew also wrote about it last August in Air Mozilla Talk and noted that the page load time for half of the sites she opened was decreased by 20 percent. As for sites that heavily rely on third-party content, she found out that 20% of the sites she tested had a reduced load time of 47% while 2% of the sites have a reduced 90% of load time.

If you are a Mozilla Firefox user and is interested to use the Tracking Protection feature, just follow these steps: First, open about:config; Then search for "privacy.trackingprotection.enabled"; and lastly, double-click or right-click the preference to toggle the Value to "true."