Microsoft Adds Tracking Prevention Feature to Edge

Microsoft Adds Tracking Prevention to Edge

Recently Microsoft introduced a new feature – Tracking Prevention – to the new Chromium-based Edge browser. This feature is like the Firefox browser’s tracking prevention feature, aiming to protect users from being tracked by websites which are not be accessed directly. It offers better transparency and control over the user’s online data.

This Tracking Prevention feature is only available for trying by Microsoft Edge Insiders preview builds now. Edge Insiders can try this new feature by turning on the experimental flag on Microsoft Edge preview builds Canary channel release (version 77.0.203.0 or higher). Microsoft states that this feature is still improving, and its rolling out on the current in-dev stage can bring useful feedback from users.

Due to a build issue, macOS now cannot try the Canary release of Edge. But the Tracking Prevention will be available in next update to the Canary channel on macOS.

How Does Edge Tracking Prevention Work?

When users visit a website, trackers from other websites may use cookies or other storage mechanisms to save information in the browser. They use this way to collect the sites users visited and the content they are interested in. Thus, to build a digital profile for some organizations to help them offer personalized content when visiting other sites.

Edge Tracking Prevention feature is very similar to the Enhanced Tracking Protection feature in Mozilla Firefox browser which was added last year. Firefox Enhanced Tracking Prevention feature is turned on by default in spring 2019.

Microsoft Edge Tracking Prevention works in a similar way as Firefox tracking prevention. When this feature is enabled, it will block the tracking scripts loaded from sites which the user doesn’t access directly, including ad slots, analytics services, etc.

Generally a tracker will access previously stored tracking information and store new tracking information in tracking process. However, if the tracking resources don’t have much meaning to the visited page, they may be blocked entirely.

The mechanism of Edge Tracking Prevention is a little bit complicated. This new Tracking Prevention feature consists of three main components: Classification, Enforcement, and Mitigations.

Microsoft adds a new component – Trust Protection Lists – to Microsoft Edge. This component includes the latest information that domains track the users on the website. This component is helpful with sourcing details to identify the tracker and update the lists for users.

Microsoft Edge Tracking Prevention feature enforces the block with two measures: Restrict storage access, block resource loads. When a known tracking resource tries to access the web storage to grab data about the user, it will prevent it from getting cookies or accessing storage APIs. The Tracking Prevention will also block a loading tracking resource before the request reaches to the network.

Moreover, it’s very hard to balance the privacy protection and tracking prevention. Microsoft will take different actions to balance the enforcement and the control of users’ personal website experience based on the tracking prevention mode they pick.

How to Enable Tracking Prevention in Microsoft Edge?

In Edge preview builds, the new Edge Tracking Prevention feature is currently in experiment and is disabled by default because there may be some bugs or sites issues. But testers can now enable it to try the tracking prevention feature in Edge.

At first, you need to visit Edge flags pate at edge://flags#edge-tracking-prevention to open the experimental settings page. Then click the drop-down arrow and choose Enabled. After that, click Relaunch Now to close Microsoft Edge browser and relaunch Microsoft Edge.

Next open Microsoft Edge settings to choose a tracking prevention mode from the three modes of Tracking prevention: Basic, Balanced, and Strict.