Mozilla is well-known for its commitment to protecting user privacy across the web, and today the organization has announced a couple of new ways it's doing that with its Firefox browser. As
had previously been suggested by bug reports in the Bugzilla tracker,
Firefox is adding protections against fingerprinting and cryptocurrency mining scripts on the web.
As Mozilla explains, fingerprinting scripts attempt to gather data about the hardware used by each visitor on a website, making it possible to track that user across the web, even if cookies are cleared. This information includes things such as information about the processor, the amount of RAM, and so on, and even Apple introduced its own measures against this kind of data collection in
macOS 10.14 Mojave last year.
As for cryptocurrency mining, the threat has become all too common around the internet these days, and websites can have your computer work in the background to harvest cryptocurrency for someone else. This can drain your system resources and impact your system's performance.
To address both of these issues, Mozilla partnered with
Disconnect to compile a list of domains that serve these kinds of scripts and include them in Firefox, and users can now choose to block either or both of them. The feature is currently available in the Nightly version 68 and Beta version 67, and it's disabled by default while Mozilla tests its reliability, but it's expected to be enabled by default at some point in the future.
If you'd like to try it out right now, you can download your preferred version of Firefox from the
experimental releases page. It should go without saying, but these versions are not without risks and may be unstable for day-to-day use.
