Mozilla has announced a new tracking protection feature that will be present it the forthcoming versions of Firefox browser. As of now, this feature is only available in the Nightly versions of Firefox. But looking at the speed with which Mozilla is releasing new versions of Firefox through the release channel, it is only a matter of a few months before this new tracking protection feature makes it way into the main release version. What this feature does is block all the know trackers on the internet. This is more of a highly forced blocking of trackers as opposed to the do-not-track feature that only sends a request to the websites for not tracking your activities.
By default the tracking protection feature is disabled. If you want to enable this tracking protection feature, then you can follow these simple steps:
- Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press Enter. You will be shown a warning screen, but you can click on the button labeled “I’ll be careful, I promise” and proceed.
- This will show you a big list of Firefox configuration settings, their names and values. You can narrow down the setting we are interested in by typing protection in the Search filter box.
- Find the setting named privacy.trackingprotection.enabled and double click on it to change its value from false to true.
- That’s it. Now you can try visiting websites, and all the content served through tracking servers shall be blocked.
While blocking the trackers may give you some relief from well known trackers, it cannot block all the trackers. Also blocking the content delivered through the servers may breakdown the website you are visiting itself making it very difficult to use it. Due to these reasons, many of the software experts have raised a question about this new feature in the Nightly builds of Firefox and whether it will really make into the final release versions.
You can download the Firefox Nightly versions from http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/.
more blocking == more better
your site would be greatly improved with less third party loads