Quantifying the Effects of Firefox’s Tracking Protection (2014)

blog.mozilla.org

28 points·ozh··5 comments

It appears to me like it's a ludimentary, stripped down version of uBlock/AdBlockPlus that blocks predefined domains. I don't know why that should be compiled in the browser rather than being an add-on even if it speed up some websites by 44%.

I think the strongest case for including it in the browser is that the browser is supposed to represent the interests of the user, not the website author.

I'd bet just about anything (though am open to being proved wrong) that when users learn about the pervasiveness of tracking on the internet, they don't like it. Some even take the step of installing add-ons. But since most people don't understand the situation, Mozilla is saying "our goal is to do whats best for the common case user, and even if the user doesn't understand the situation exactly, we don't think they want to be tracked".

And I say, good on them!

If all it's doing is blocking "predefined domains", I wonder how it compares to doing that with a HOSTS file. The latter is non-browser-specific and works for all applications on the system.

editing the hosts file requires admin privileges doesn't it? Doing it in the browser means it works for everybody that can launch arbitrary executables.

Worth mentioning that this setting is in Firefox for Android, which makes it much easier compared to rooting the phone.

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