Microsoft's future browsers will not enable Do Not Track as the default setting, in a reversal of the company's policy with Internet Explorer 10
An update on Microsoft's approach to Do Not Track — As industry standards evolve, how we implement those standards evolve as well.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's IE10 shipped with Do Not Track enabled by default, a unilateral move that put a privacy signal on every Windows machine without asking users what it meant — and drew years of pushback from an ad industry that treated default-on signals as noise. This post is the retreat: future browsers will ship with the setting off, framed as standards 'evolving.'
The reversal proved prescient about the signal's fate rather than its value: nearly a decade later, Mozilla removed Do Not Track from Firefox entirely, saying few websites honor the preference — making Microsoft one of the first major vendors to stop treating it as a meaningful default.
First-order effects
- Users of future Microsoft browsers lose the out-of-the-box tracking opt-out that IE10 provided; anyone who wants Do Not Track will have to find and flip it manually.
- Ad networks and publishers get relief from a default-on signal they never honored at scale, while Microsoft sheds the position of having imposed a de facto standard without consensus.
Second-order effects
- Browser makers converge on the same conclusion — the W3C-era preference header dies not by mandate but by neglect, as Firefox's full removal follows Microsoft's demotion of the default.
- Privacy expectations migrate away from voluntary browser signals toward whatever defaults regulators impose, as later seen when Microsoft changed Edge's default-browser prompts for EEA users under the EU's DMA compliance changes.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, user privacy choices stop living in optional headers that websites may ignore and start living in legally enforced rules — leaving browser defaults as UX decisions rather than policy statements.
- The episode sets a template for platform vendors: take a principled default position unilaterally, absorb the backlash, then quietly revert once the underlying standard fails — a cycle regulators increasingly step into to break.
The trend: Browser-level privacy defaults like Do Not Track are being abandoned by the vendors that pioneered them, shifting the burden of enforcing user preferences from voluntary standards to regulation.