“Right now, we haven’t found the same sweet spot for turning on by default.” “We’ve been working on fingerprinting pretty closely,” Camp said.
Tuesday’s Firefox update will leave a fingerprinting blocker off by default. That update to Chrome will, however, match the current release of Safari in blocking “fingerprinting” – a common workaround to tracker blocking in which sites record the finer parameters of visiting browsers to track individual users. Google made vague announcements about stronger Chrome privacy controls at its I/O developer conference in early May. Even reading those pledges generously, it seems future version of Chrome won’t come preset to block Google’s tracking. The Mac-only Safari has 7% in StatCounter's data and 4% in NetMarketShare's, and both surveys show Microsoft's Edge trailing behind that company's obsolete Internet Explorer.Ĭhrome’s privacy protections have lagged badly behind Safari and Firefox. Both StatCounter and NetMarketShare give it 10% of the market, with the former crediting Google’s Chrome with a 69% share and the latter 66%.
The new version, called Enhanced Tracking Protection, will let the ads through but block their tracking attempts.įirefox is the second-most-used desktop browser. That old feature also blocked ads from loading if they would have attempted to track users, which resulted in some news sites nagging Firefox users to turn off their ad blockers.
On the go: How to protect your privacy when you travelĪpple WWDC 2019:: iTunes is yesterday today's all about swifter new iOS features (If you've got Firefox now, Camp noted, you won't get this new setting active immediately, as part of what he called “our normal engineering rollout.”) Ad networks use the resulting data about your reading habits to build sophisticated models of your interests that can seem uncanny or just creepy.įirefox began offering a version of this feature in 2017 but didn’t make it active by default. Like the feature Apple introduced two years ago and then upgraded last year, Firefox’s tracking prevention stops ad networks from identifying your browser by placing cookies – small text files – that they can update through ads they place across the Web.