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Comment by ch4ck | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer has tracking protection since IE9.

They are completely different beasts. Internet Explorer merely offers the option to enable[1] "Do Not Track", which websites and advertisers are free to ignore[2], while Safari's new ad tracker blocker "uses machine learning to identify trackers, segregate the cross-site scripting data, put it away so now your privacy — your browsing history — is your own"[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track#Internet_Explorer...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track#Effectiveness

[3] https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/05/apple-adds-a-tracker-block...

Also worth pointing out that Safari has had the 'do not track' feature for years and Twitter recently announced they are going to start ignoring it (a good example of how useless it is). So this new protection is very necessary and a great USP for Safari.

You are actually incorrect. Tracking Protection refers to an IE feature that lets you set "Tracking Protection Lists", which block traffic to specified domains and URLs. You can see a bit about them here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh273400(v=vs.85).a...

The whole "Do Not Track" default thing was, of course, a huge fiasco, as Google and others chose to ignore IE's default usage of it.

I don't know why this has been downvoted. Tracking Protection Lists are one of the best and unsung features of IE. People don't realize that they're different from Do Not Track.

Do you have to set it up manually? How is this better than downloading one of the privacy-protecting extensions available for most desktop browsers?

Arguably, the fact that you don't have to trust a random third party extension code is a perk. And since this is a pretty straight up text file format it works off of, it's easy to roll your own or customize it as you wish.

As I said in one of my comments, it's a bit janky to set up because you have to select one of the Tracking Protection Lists from their add-on gallery to turn it on, there's no default list pre-selected.

Going to my IE right now to activate it, I have to say this is a janky solution. It opens the Add-ons window, where you can see you have no Tracking Protection Lists. Then you can click to browse the add-on gallery for them, and then you have to scroll down and pick a list from a set of options.

While this is flexible, open, and that's all good, the lack of a common sense default and a multi-step setup process is probably why like... even I am not using this right now.

If Apple does this by default, it's gonna make a huge dent in Google Analytics' numbers, whereas probably almost nobody uses the feature in IE.

"it's gonna make a huge dent in Google Analytics' numbers".

Very unlikely, since almost nobody uses desktop Safari.

This feature will surely show up in iOS Safari, which would have a big impact.

It's already in iOS 11 beta: https://twitter.com/webkit/status/871834286286139392

Lol.

It’s obviously not true that nobody uses Safari on Apple’s laptops and desktops.

Apple’s Mac sales have doubled since 2008 and is in the top 5 when it comes to PC shipments: http://www.asymco.com/2016/11/02/wherefore-art-thou-macintos...

Shipping ~30 million Macs a year certainly isn't almost nobody.

He isn't talking about the number of macs sold though. Market share of Desktop Safari according to NetMarketShare [0] in May 2017 was 3.56%.

[0] : https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...

Web advertising is such a cutthroat and low margin business that having 2–3% of all browser users become untrackable is a big deal.

Safari on iOS obviously has significantly higher market share on mobile and the intelligent tracker blocking is part of iOS 11 beta.

Yes, it will be a big deal when it comes to mobile.

If you're interested, I created and maintain a tracking protection list based on the Ghostery and Disconnect filter lists. It's concise, fast, and better than anything in the IE gallery. https://amtopel.github.io/tpl/

IE isn't really a browser I use heavily personally. Has Microsoft carried the feature forward to Edge, or are they relying on extensions from the Store for that?

They discontinued it in Edge, unfortunately.

But you can install extensions like ghostery that so the same things in edge

But you shouldn't have to install extensions to do this..

Most sites don't obey the do not track header. Edge on the other hand is much more nefarious, by default it sends all data sent by POST requests to Microsoft. I was surprised to find Bing sending data from people who use Edge on my site to try and improve their search results. There are so many security and privacy issues with this it's not funny at all.

I've never heard that Edge sends absolutely all POST requests to any website to Microsoft as well. Could you share an article or something proving this?

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