No, Mozilla is not abandoning its Tracking Protection feature

Mozilla's Tracking Protection feature is one of the many exciting features that the organization is working on currently.

Designed to block the bulk of online tracking without blocking advertisement outright, it can be seen as a compromise between blocking ads completely and not blocking them at all.

As an added benefit, it is said to improve page loading time significantly since it blocks tracking connections from being made by the browser.

Ed Bott suggested today in a post on ZDnet that Mozilla appears to have abandoned the tracking protection initiative in Firefox, stating that the main bug on Mozilla's bug tracking site has not received a comment in months.

Another reason brought forward in the article is that Monica Chew left Mozilla recently after working on the feature.

If you check the bug you will notice that the last comment dates back to January 2015. You will notice however as well that updates have been posted, dependencies mostly and that the bug is the main tracking bug for the feature linking to dozens of bugs it depends on.

If you check these bugs, you will notice that updates have been posted to several of the bugs this month and in past months.

It makes no sense to update bugs if the project has indeed been abandoned. The conclusion is that Tracking Protection is still being worked on.

Ed Bott is right in stating that Mozilla has not yet revealed when and how the feature will land in Firefox, but that too is not uncommon.

If you compare that to e10s, Firefox's multi-process feature, you will find the same approach used by Mozilla. Some features may take years to complete depending on how many people are working on it actively, and whether other features are prioritized by Mozilla.

Tracking Protection is also included in a mockup of Firefox's new control center. You can check out the wireframe on Bugzilla which shows its integration. While that dates back two months, it is a clear sign that Mozilla is still planning to integrate the feature in the browser.

 

If you take all of this together, you cannot possibly come to the conclusion that the Tracking Protection feature has been abandoned by Mozilla. It may not be priority number one though but that is understandable as Mozilla is working on e10s and other major features at the same time.

There is obviously always a chance that a feature won't make it and will be abandoned before its launch but it seems highly unlikely at this point in time that this will be the fate of the Tracking Protection feature.