14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has just announced a new feature for its Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, as the company works on providing users with additional privacy controls on all platforms.
Tracking prevention was announced by Microsoft at Build 2019 earlier this year, but it’s now available for testing beginning with Microsoft Edge Canary version 77.0.203.0.
Already available in other browsers currently on the market, like Mozilla Firefox, tracking protection blocks trackers from collecting information when you load specific websites.
In Microsoft Edge, you’ll be allowed to choose the level of protection that you want to use when browsing the web, namely basic, balanced, and strict. Microsoft Edge will ship with the balanced mode as the default setting.
“Tracking prevention is designed to protect you from being tracked by websites that you aren’t accessing directly. Whenever a website is visited, trackers from other sites may save information in the browser using cookies and other storage mechanisms. This information may include the sites you’ve visited and the content you’re interested in, building a digital profile which can be accessed by organizations to offer personalized content when visiting other sites,” the Microsoft Edge team explains.
Improvements for blockers on their way
Microsoft says that these existing settings could change in the coming weeks as it continues to work on improving the blockers in Microsoft Edge. One area that the company is focusing on is providing additional controls over your recent interactions with sites.
“For sites that you interact with in a first party context on a regular basis, access to cookies, localStorage, IndexedDB and other storage may be allowed in a broader context to ensure web functionality, like login flows or social network commenting, just works. For sites you don’t visit, we may more aggressively block that content in a third-party context. This will let us improve protection while the sites you care about continue to work across the web,” Microsoft says.
This new feature is available in the latest Canary builds for testing and they could go live in the Dev build next week.