What is Tracking Prevention?
As you browse the web, advertising networks, analytics companies, and social media platforms embed hidden scripts (trackers) and cookies into websites to monitor your behavior. These trackers follow you from site to site, building a detailed profile of your interests, purchases, and habits to serve you highly targeted advertisements. Microsoft Edge includes a built-in feature called Tracking Prevention to mitigate this privacy invasion. By default, Edge uses a “Balanced” setting, which blocks known malicious trackers but allows many third-party advertising cookies to function in order to prevent websites from breaking. If you want maximum privacy and are willing to sacrifice some convenience, you can enable “Strict” mode.
How to Enable Strict Tracking Prevention
Switching to Strict mode ensures Edge aggressively blocks the vast majority of trackers across all sites.
- Open the Microsoft Edge browser on your computer.
- Click the three horizontal dots (…) in the top right corner of the window.
- Select Settings from the dropdown menu.
- In the left-hand sidebar of the Settings page, click on Privacy, search, and services.
- The first section at the top of this page is Tracking prevention. Ensure the master toggle switch is turned On.
- Below the toggle, you will see three large blocks: Basic, Balanced, and Strict. Click the box for Strict.
What to Expect After Enabling Strict Mode
When Strict mode is active, Edge will actively block most cross-site tracking cookies. You will immediately notice that advertisements become much more generic (as they can no longer access your browsing history to target you), and pages may load slightly faster because fewer background scripts are executing.
The Trade-off: The primary reason this isn’t the default setting is that aggressive blocking can break certain website functionalities. You may encounter issues like embedded videos failing to play, social media comment sections disappearing, or login portals getting stuck in a loop. If a critical website breaks, you don’t need to turn off Strict mode globally. Instead, click the lock icon next to the website’s URL in the address bar, toggle off Tracking prevention for that specific site, and refresh the page to create a local exception.