It’s no secret that Mozilla sees privacy as a differentiating feature for its revitalized Firefox browser. Today, the Firefox team is launching one of its broadest sets of releases that aim to keep advertisers and others from following you across the web, while also making it harder for Facebook to track you. In addition, the organization is launching a desktop version of its password manager and some improvements to its Firefox Monitor data breach notification service.
“This past year, we’ve seen tech companies talk a big game about privacy as they’re realizing that, after several global scandals, people feel increasingly vulnerable,” Firefox SVP Dave Camp writes in today’s announcement, explaining the organization’s reasoning for today’s update. “It’s unfortunate that this shift had to happen in order for tech companies to take notice. At Firefox, we’re doing more than that. We believe that in order to truly protect people, we need to establish a new standard that puts people’s privacy first.”
The changes are a big deal for privacy, but Mozilla doesn’t push the envelope quite as far as Apple did when it added a similar feature to Safari a couple years ago. Apple’s browser blocks nearly all third-party trackers by default, rather than just known trackers collected on a blacklist. Apple also limits tracker from being used by third parties at all if you haven’t interacted with the website they originate from in a full day.
Mozilla is trying to strike a middle ground, by only blocking known trackers and not all cookies in general. A spokesperson says the company found that blocking all cookies “leads to scenarios where some websites may not function properly,” and so it chose this partial approach to prevent “potential usability issues.” Anyone who wants more protection can go into Firefox’s settings and change the tracking blocking settings from “standard” the default setting to “strict.”
While Firefox isn’t leading the pack when it comes to blocking trackers, it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of Google’s Chrome browser, which is just starting to dabble in features that can limit tracking. Google has a vested interest in keeping some amount of web tracking alive the company survives off of ads, which are often targeted whereas Mozilla and Apple don’t.
