QA/Polaris/Tracking protection

Feature Ownership & Status

Ownership

Dev Lead: Monica Chew

QA : Catalin Varga, :VarCat on IRC

Release target: TBD

Status

[LANDED] Nightly 34: first landed on 34

[DISABLED] Nightly 38: release target moved to TBD

Summary

Context

Websites need to be able to deliver and monetize the content they create. Users want more protection from online tracking. Tracking Protection is a new platform-level technology that blocks HTTP loads at the network level. Coupled with a user-declared opt-out, such as Do Not Track, we will explore various paths that can provide users with more safety while allowing websites to reliably deliver ads that meet or exceed consumer's tracking preferences.

Implementation

The current blocklist is powered by Disconnect. Tracking Protection's blocklist model and pattern matching was already proven in Safe Browsing. Tracking Protection differs from third-party cookie management and fingerprinting blocking in that Tracking Protection blocks all loads from suspected domains. The idea is "don't talk to domains you don't trust". For details on the UX experience of this feature please check this mock-up https://bug1029193.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=8459849 .

Enabling the component

There are 2 ways to enable tracking protection

By enabling polaris:

browser.polaris.enabled set to true

[1]

By enabling tracking protection related prefs:

privacy.trackingprotection.enabled set to true privacy.trackingprotection.ui.enabled set to true

References

• Tracking bug: [2]
• Feature related wiki page [3]

Test Cases

• [IN PROGRESS]

Sign off

Criteria

• All the test cases were executed.
• All the blocker, critical, major bugs have been fixed.