Firefox does not block analytics by default

July 10th, 2021
browsers, privacy, tech
There's a myth going around that Firefox blocks analytics providers in its default configuration. For example, in a recent HN discussion 5% of the comments were people asserting it did, and another 5% were people responding to them to assert that it doesn't. To confirm, it doesn't:

You can test this yourself:

  1. Open Firefox

  2. If you've added any extensions create a fresh profile, so you can test the default configuration

  3. Open Developer Tools

  4. Open the Networking panel

  5. Visit a site with analytics (ex: jefftk.com)

  6. Observe pings being sent (ex: google-analytics.com/j/collect?...)

Firefox does have an "Enhanced Tracking Protection" mode, but it's not enabled by default. Additionally, Firefox users are likely disproportionately blocking ads, which also block analytics scripts.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong

Recent posts on blogs I like:

How Does Fiction Affect Reality?

Social norms

via Thing of Things April 19, 2024

Clarendon Postmortem

I posted a postmortem of a community I worked to help build, Clarendon, in Cambridge MA, over at Supernuclear.

via Home March 19, 2024

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices

In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both …

via Posts on March 16, 2024

more     (via openring)