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Firefox 57's been quietly delaying tracking scripts • The Register

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TEILEN

Trying to stop snoops stalling page loads
When Mozilla lobbed Firefox 57 over the fence last month, it introduced an anti-tracking feature without saying anything much about it.
The changes are in the browser’s “network requests scheduler”, and developer Honza Bambas explained the change in detail here .
Bambas wrote that during page load, the scheduler uses the Tracking Protection database “to delay load of scripts from tracking domains when possible during the time a page is actively loading and rendering”.
The feature, which Bambas called “tailing”, should save time on page load performance, since a Web page’s images and scripts will get priority.
Bambas noted that the feature doesn’t disable tracking scripts: those requests are “kept on hold only while there are site sub-resources still loading and only up to about 6 seconds.”
That applies to “scripts added dynamically or as async”, while tracking images (eg, transparent GIFs) “are always delayed”.
The feature won’t behave perfectly in every case – but that, Bambas wrote, is because some pages are simply badly written. An ill-designed page that uses Google’s Page-Hiding Snippet, for example, might load as blank for a few seconds, and if a developer is sufficiently inept to refer an API of an async tracking script from a sync script, a race condition is set up.
The feature’s bug-tracking channel is also worth a read if you want to see Bamba’s decision-making during the eight-month development process. ®
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