In July 2019, my main browser of choice, Firefox Nightly, landed a new dashboard. It shows how much was blocked by the browser’s tracking protection feature. This can be found in about:protections. Let’s look at the stats after this first year.

Tracking protection is essential on today’s web. It’s a feature that both Firefox (Enhanced Tracking Protection) and Safari (Intelligent Tracking Protection) have had for quite some time now. Most websites are still full of naughty scripts that pass on information to social media giants, track you across websites, exercise finger printing and even mine crypto currencies.

I use the “Strict” mode in Nightly, which comes with a warning: ‘causes some sites to break’. I don’t recall ever seeing sites break at all, but your mileage may vary. Where it does happen, an exception can be made for a specific site.

The dashboard in about:protections tells you what types of trackers were blocked over the past week, as well as a total since you started using the future. After just over a year, mine shows 22281 trackers since July 5, 2019.

Like I’m excited browsers can fix accessibility problems, I’m grateful that they help address this problem when many websites don’t. It’s time for more minimum viable data collection. Happy birthday, tracking protection dashboard!

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