The move, which will involve a series of updates over the course of the next few months, is among one of the most proactive approaches to protect consumer privacy that it’s ever employed and will make a key difference between it and Google’s Chrome.

Writing in its bog, a spokesMozilla said: “Anyone who isn’t an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. Mozilla will block trackers that slow page load times and strip cookies from web content "

Firefox users will have a series of controls to choose which information to share with which websites. In addition to protecting consumer privacy, Mozilla said this will improve performance, as many web trackers inflate page load times.

In May a Ghostery study found that more than 50 percent of all time spent loading webpages was dedicated to loading third-party trackers designed to follow users around the web, collect data, and hand that data over to advertisers.

The company said it is going to study the effects of blocking trackers that slow page times starting next month, and it will make that feature on by default in Firefox 63 if it proves successful in improving performance.

It will also “strip cookies and block storage access from third-party tracking content”, a move it will also test in September with beta users before implementing it in Firefox 65, which is due out sometime in the next few months. Both of those features are available today for users of Firefox Nightly, which is the browser’s public pre-release channel for new features.

Mozilla is also going to have a crack at blocking newer and harder-to-detect practices like fingerprinting, which detect the type of device a user is using without their knowledge or consent, and cryptomining scripts that make use of excess computing power on a device to secretly generate digital currency.

“Some sites will continue to want user data in exchange for content, but now they will have to ask for it, a positive change for people who up until now had no idea of the value exchange they were asked to make”, reads Mozilla’s most recent announcement.

“Blocking pop-up ads in the original Firefox release was the right move in 2004, because it didn’t just make Firefox users happier, it gave the advertising platforms of the time a reason to care about their users’ experience. In 2018, we hope that our efforts to empower our users will have the same effect.”