You can see which trackers were blocked for a specific page by clicking the padlock icon to the left of the address. With the Strict setting enabled, most third-party ads, including oversized banner ads that push content down in an annoying fashion, disappeared completely, and pages loaded significantly faster. The Balanced setting includes a fair number of ads and social widgets. In the Strict setting, by contrast, storage access and resource loads are blocked for a large set of categories, with elements such as tracking pixels, iframes, and scripts completely prevented from loading and fetching other resources. A smaller group of third-party domains are blocked from loading any resources. Why the difference? In the Balanced setting, Edge blocks storage access for a large number of tracker categories, which means those domains can load content but can't set or retrieve cookies. Interestingly, Microsoft is on that list as well, in the 11 spot, with about 1.7% of the blocked items.) (On my main Windows 10 PC, running the Edge Dev builds with Tracking Prevention set to Strict, Google is at the top of the list of Blocked Trackers, with 23% of the total, more than Adobe, Facebook, Twitter, and comScore combined.

The percentages for well-known sources of tracking like Google, Facebook, and Adobe were roughly the same, but the list also included a significant number of analytics companies, such as comScore, Chartbeat, and Nielsen. With the Strict settings in place, Edge blocked a total of 739 trackers, or about two-thirds fewer than in the Balanced setting. You would think that a stricter set of criteria for blocking trackers would result in more items being blocked instead, the exact opposite was true.

I was so startled by the results when I first tried this experiment that I ran all the tests a second time, with the same counterintuitive results. So, what happens when you kick the Tracking Prevention level up to the highest level, Strict? Perhaps not what you expect.

How to block a site on microsoft edge