Over the past couple of months since we announced that we would broaden our approach to anti-tracking we’ve been experimenting and testing Enhanced Tracking Protection, a feature that blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers. Recently, we published a set of policies that define which tracking practices will be blocked in Firefox, and a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking section where users can choose their desired level of privacy protection. As the next step in our path to enable Enhanced Tracking Protection by default, this week we launched a study to observe how enabling this functionality for a group of Firefox users in our Release Channel would impact the online experience.

As part of the study, selected users will receive an onboarding experience which explains how to disable Content Blocking functionality like Enhanced Tracking Protection on specific websites. The onboarding looks like this:

With Enhanced Tracking Protection, you just browse and Firefox helps to prevent you from being tracked from website to website. Most web pages will load just fine, and your privacy will be better protected.

If you do happen to discover a web page not functioning as expected, you can report the issue by clicking on the shield icon in the address bar. Under “Content Blocking”, click on the “Report a problem” link. Your feedback will help us make the Enhanced Tracking Protection experience better for everyone.

From the same menu, you can also click on the button that says “Turn off Blocking for This Site”. Firefox will reload the page with Enhanced Tracking Protection turned off.

If you haven’t been selected for the study, but you would like to test the feature ahead of our rollout to more users, you can do so with the following steps:

Click the menu button . Click Content Blocking. This takes you to the Content Blocking section in your Firefox Preferences Privacy & Security panel. Under Content Blocking, click on the “Custom” option and check the “Cookies” checkbox, and make sure that “Third-party trackers” is selected in the drop-down menu:

What’s Next?

We will monitor the results of this experiment so as to ensure that we are able to turn on these default protections for users with few disruptions.