Firefox 69 Brings ‘Privacy’ To The Forefront

Firefox had lost its charm since I personally began using it in the last decade but I have started using it since last year and loving the experience. Especially since it was always known to embrace the values of ‘online privacy’. It’s not that the topic of online privacy wasn’t around but since the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal blew up on our face it’s now taken centre stage in our lives. Now all of a sudden there has been a renewed interest in online privacy, securing browsing, ad tracking, and harder as it seems for companies, they are convincing their customers that their data is kept safe and not lost to some maniacal coding or business practice. Well, I’m happy that Mozilla has taken the lead in online privacy protection for others to take suit — I’m expecting at least Apple to reinforce Safari.

Firefox took an exemplary leap this week on the protection of users’ privacy with their latest update (Firefox 69) effectively making ‘privacy’ the centrepiece of its development process with a slew of features including limiting the use of Flash has been introduced, an archaic piece of program which I sincerely thought was gone, dead or buried forever but I was so wrong.

• 100% of users now get the Enhanced Tracking Protection, working behind the scenes it keeps a company from forming a profile of the user based on the tracking of their browsing behaviour across websites often without knowledge or consent.
• An option for blocking crypto miners was introduced in previous versions of Firefox Nightly and Beta but it’s now included in the ‘Standard Mode‘ of the Content blocking preferences today. There’s also a feature which blocks Fingerprinting scripts who harvest a snapshot of your computer’s configuration when you visit a website. This feature is not currently enabled by default (Preferences > Privacy & Security > Content Blocking > Enable Strict mode).
• The “Always Activate” option for Flash plugin content has been removed. Firefox will now always ask for user permission before activating Flash content on a website.

A much-awaited ‘Block Autoplay’ feature has been released giving users the right to block audio and video. But the most noteworthy feature has come for Mac users in terms of battery-saving. Firefox, I sincerely believe, has finally come to rule the browser wars.