Fat_Thor

One of the less known features of Internet Explorer 9, released way back in 2011, was its Tracking Protection. In it, there was an option to turn on personalized tracking protection where it heuristically keep track of trackers that appear more than once on different sites and block it automatically. You can still find it in Internet Explorer 11. And prior, IE8 had a lot of features that was ahead of its time. IIRC, IE8 was one of the first browsers to have ad-blocker built in. This was almost a decade before any other browser made tracking protection a built in feature.

I would like to see Mozilla Firefox be forced to do the same. As of now, they don't even notify the user of their default Google search to the users. So millions of their user url typing history are being recorded and sent to Google even if they don't use the search function specifically. This in someway has to violates the GDPR.

A little know fact about IE8 is that it came with a built in content blocking mechanism appropriately called Tracking Protection way back in 2009. IIRC it was the first browser to come with ad blocking built in, although not turn on by default. Opera came with content blocking a bit later.

IE9 improved on it with what I think is one of the most impressive feature to this day. It had a heuristic tracking protection that block trackers once it's detected at a certain re-occurrence counts that you can config. So in theory it doesn't need to subscribed to an ad list like all browsers do today.

IE took a lot of crap deservedly so, but that overshadowed a lot of pioneer works that later browsers adopted.