On January 15, 2020, Microsoft is scheduled to roll out a completely revamped Edge browser to the general public. That browser, which is available for beta testing now on all supported versions of Windows and MacOS, includes a feature called Tracking Prevention.

Microsoft added a Tracking Protection feature to Internet Explorer 9, in 2011 and it used simple text files called Tracking Protection Lists (TPLs) to allow or block third-party requests from specific domains. That's the same general principle behind Tracking Prevention in the new Edge, but the implementation is more usable and more sophisticated, with multiple Trust Protection Lists taking the place of a single TPL.

While it is aimed at the online advertising and tracking industries, it mostly seems designed to kick Google's goolies.

Using the default Balanced setting, Tracking Prevention blocked a total of 2,318 trackers or an average of 35 on each page. Of that total, 552 were from Google domains. That means that Google domains make up 23.8 percent of the total. To put that into perspective, the second entry on the list of blocked trackers was Facebook, which represented 3.8 percent of the total.

ZDNet's Ed Bot said that rather than an anti-Google conspiracy, the article suggests this is instead just a reflection of both Google's ubiquity and its business model.

"Google Analytics and Google AdSense are embedded on a staggering number of web pages."