This is no news to anybody that ever tried an ad blocker, a proxy/content filter or even a generic hosts file. The difference is very noticeable. In fact, it's the main reason I run such filters. The difference is not only in traffic saved/lower latency, but also much lower cpu usage.
However, this it would be a bit hypocritical for Mozilla (and probably the reason why the filter is off by default). Firefox is not much better than Chrome when it comes to phoning home and privacy invading features. Heck, on mobile it's even worse.
What about disabling by default "beacon.enabled" for a start? Contrarily to massive ad blocking, nobody would notice. Err, maybe these ad networks would? Oops.
At every new Firefox release I do a tour of new settings/flags and it's saddening how many times I have to switch something off.
I don’t have Firefox open now, but I remember there are three such options in Preferences > Advanced > the second tab from the left. I think two of them are checked by default – they involve sending anonymous usage information. You can uncheck the checkboxes to disable them.
On the second launch after a new install or new profile creation, Firefox shows a notification bar about these settings with a button to quickly change them. I don’t remember how long ago those settings were added, nor whether they showed the notification bar for those updates.
Google says that ad blockers make the websites slow, due to the way they interact with the DOM (and of course google doesn't provide more efficient APIs for ad blocking)
Personally I use Ghostery on Chrome right now but with this development by Mozilla, I'm inclined to switch. Feels good to use a browser with no corporate interests, and a simple feature to stop abuse of cookies by ~70% is just crazy. Too crazy to not be a built-in browser feature. Maybe I'm disrupting how news sites intend to work, but they're disrupting how the web was intended to work.
Anyway, ... I got sidetracked. I meant to say that what's even "funnier" is that if I disable Ghostery for some domain temporarily, the number of trackers usually skyrocket even further, since now the scripts get to run more scripts.
Yep, i have noticed those "matryoshka" scripts from time to time. Enabling one script domain in Noscript result in 2+ more waiting to be enabled after page reload.
And sometimes you have to dig 3+ layers into the nesting to get the site to function at all...
However, this it would be a bit hypocritical for Mozilla (and probably the reason why the filter is off by default). Firefox is not much better than Chrome when it comes to phoning home and privacy invading features. Heck, on mobile it's even worse.
What about disabling by default "beacon.enabled" for a start? Contrarily to massive ad blocking, nobody would notice. Err, maybe these ad networks would? Oops.
At every new Firefox release I do a tour of new settings/flags and it's saddening how many times I have to switch something off.