Firefox to block ad trackers by default
A recent study by Ghostery showed that over 90% of web pages contain trackers and those trackers are responsible for over 50% of the load time of many pages. It's no secret that more users than ever are trying to protect their privacy with third-party ad-blocker browser extensions and now Mozilla are taking the most aggressive anti-tracking stance we've seen to date.
As of Firefox 65, Mozilla will be taking a host of actions to protect mitigate the negative effects of unchecked tracking.
1) From Firefox 63, trackers that take longer than 5 seconds to load will be blocked by default
2) From Firefox 65, cross-site tracking will be blocked by default
3) Future versions of Firefox will automatically block 'fingerprinting' of users
In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go.
We believe these changes are tremendously important for the web, both by forcing tracking providers to take an interest in user experience and, more maybe importantly, reducing the complexity of privacy for users. This is especially the case for 'finger printing' users, whereby tracking of an individual is achieved through a combination of meta data about that user's device and configuration, which is currently difficult to protect against.
The impact is likely to be felt primarily by both digital marketers, who will lose even more data on their users and most certainly by content sites that rely on a slew of third-party trackers and scripts to extract value from users in lieu of a paywall.
If you want to try out these new features already, you can get them in the Firefox Nightly builds.