English

Tracking Protection in Firefox For Privacy and Performance

Cryptography and Security 2015-06-15 v1

Abstract

We present Tracking Protection in the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Tracking Protection is a new privacy technology to mitigate invasive tracking of users' online activity by blocking requests to tracking domains. We evaluate our approach and demonstrate a 67.5% reduction in the number of HTTP cookies set during a crawl of the Alexa top 200 news sites. Since Firefox does not download and render content from tracking domains, Tracking Protection also enjoys performance benefits of a 44% median reduction in page load time and 39% reduction in data usage in the Alexa top 200 news sites.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1506.04104,
  title  = {Tracking Protection in Firefox For Privacy and Performance},
  author = {Georgios Kontaxis and Monica Chew},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1506.04104},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Web 2.0 Security and Privacy (W2SP) 2015. Awarded Best Paper prize at workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-22T09:52:45.969Z