Mozilla: Use of Firefox tracking protection reduces loading time by 44 percent
Mozilla states that a study of the performance of its tracking protection technology in Firefox shows that popular websites load an average of 44 percent faster, while the amount of bandwidth consumed decreases by an average of 39 percent.
The layer of protection against trackers has been in place since Firefox 35. The functionality, if manually enabled, blocks all connections to unsecured third-party websites. Mozilla says that it has set up its filter list, partly on the basis of the black list that Disconnect uses, so that unintended side effects, such as parts that do not work on a website, are prevented as much as possible.
A study that Mozilla conducted together with Columbia University shows that the filter has a positive effect on the loading time of websites. To do this, two hundred popular websites with Firefox were visited and the data analysed. The average loading time of a webpage was reduced by 44 percent after enabling the tracking protection. The data traffic generated, in which data from third-party websites was filtered out, decreased by an average of 39 percent due to the filter.
Mozilla cites the weather site Weather.com as an example. With the filter on, the loading time is 3.5 seconds, versus 6.3 seconds without tracking protection. The number of http requests also fell from 219 to 98, so that instead of 4.3MB only 2.8MB had to be downloaded.
In their research paper, the researchers take a critical stance towards trackers by advertising companies, partly because the do-not-track initiative has died a quiet death and self-regulation seems to be a thing of the past. According to the authors, there is currently a race to the bottom between internet users, advertising companies and content providers with too great a dominant position for advertisers. They therefore see more potential in alternative advertising models, such as Google Contributor, which allows internet users to surf banner-free to certain sites for a small fee. Incidentally, Mozilla recently came up with its own advertising model: ‘privacy-friendly’ tiles with advertisements in Firefox.