Microsoft Edge comes equipped with a built-in “Tracking Prevention” feature designed to block third-party trackers, malicious scripts, and advertising networks from monitoring your browsing behaviour across the web. While this is an excellent privacy feature for general consumers, it can be highly disruptive for web developers, digital marketers, or users accessing strict enterprise intranet portals. Heavy tracking prevention can cause legacy web applications to break, single-sign-on (SSO) authentication loops to fail, or crucial marketing analytics scripts to be silently dropped. If you need absolute compatibility and unfiltered network requests, you must turn this feature off.
This guide explains how to completely disable the Tracking Prevention feature in Microsoft Edge.
Turn Off Tracking Prevention via Edge Settings
You can disable the tracker blocker directly through the browser’s privacy settings. This method does not require administrative privileges and takes effect immediately without needing to restart the browser.
- Open Microsoft Edge.
- Click the three horizontal dots (Settings and more) in the top-right corner of the window.
- Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
- In the left-hand navigation pane, click on Privacy, search, and services.
- Look at the very first section at the top of the right-hand pane, titled “Tracking prevention”.
- You will see a large toggle switch next to the words Tracking prevention. By default, it is turned on and set to “Balanced.”
- Tap the toggle switch to turn it to the Off position.
Understand the Implications
When you disable Tracking Prevention, the three standard options (Basic, Balanced, and Strict) will immediately grey out. The browser will no longer intervene in any network requests.
It is important to understand that disabling this feature means all scripts, cookies, and trackers from any website you visit will be allowed to load and execute. This includes cross-site tracking cookies used by advertising networks to build a profile of your browsing habits.
A Better Alternative for Developers: If you only need to disable tracking prevention for a specific development environment or a broken company portal, it is highly recommended to leave the master switch On. Instead, click on Exceptions located just below the Strict profile box. Here, you can add the specific URLs (e.g., https://dev.mycompany.internal) that require unfiltered access, ensuring the rest of your web browsing remains protected.