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Great News! Firefox 69 Blocks Third-Party Cookies, Autoplay Videos & Cryptominers by Default
If you’re using Mozilla Firefox and haven’t updated yet to the latest version, you are missing a lot of new and important features.
Awesome new features in Firefox 69 release
To start with, Mozilla Firefox 69 enforces stronger security and privacy options by default. Here are some of the major highlights of the new release.
Firefox 69 blocks autoplay videos
A lot of websites offer auto-play videos nowadays. No matter whether it is a pop-up video or a video embedded in an article set to autoplay, it is blocked by default (or you may be prompted about it).
The Block Autoplay feature gives users to block any video playing automatically.
No more third party tracking cookies
By default, as part of the Enhanced Tracking Protection feature, it will now block third-party tracking cookies and crypto miners. This is a very useful change to enhance privacy protection while using Mozilla Firefox.
There are two kind of cookies: first party and third party. The first party cookies are owned by the website itself. These are the ‘good cookies’ that improve your browsing experience by keeping you logged in, remembering your password or entry fields etc. The third party cookies are owned by domains other than the website you visit. Ad servers use these cookies to track you and serve you tracking ads on all the website you visit. Firefox 69 aims to block these.
You will observe the shield icon in the address bar when it’s active. You may choose to disable it for specific websites.
No more cryptomining off your CPU
The lust for cryptocurrency has plagued the world. The cost of GPU has gone high because the professional cryptominers use them for mining cryptocurrency.
People are using computers at work to secretly mine cryptocurrency. And when I say work, I don’t necessarily mean an IT company. Only this year, people got caught mining cryptocurency at a nuclear plant in Ukrain.
That’s not it. If you visit some websites, they run scripts and use your computer’s CPU to mine cryptocurrency. This is called cryptojacking in IT terms.
The good thing is that Firefox 69 will automatically blocking cryptominers. So websites should not be able to exploit your system resources for cryptojacking.
Stronger Privacy with Firefox 69
If you take it up a notch with a stricter setting, it will block fingerprinters as well. So, you won’t have to worry about sharing your computer’s configuration info via fingerprinters when you choose the strict privacy setting in Firefox 69.
In the official blog post about the release, Mozilla mentions that with this release, they expect to provide protection for 100% of our users by default.
Performance Improvements
Even though Linux hasn’t been mentioned in the changelog – it mentions performance, UI, and battery life improvements for systems running on Windows 10/mac OS. If you observe any performance improvements, do mention it in comments.
Wrapping Up
In addition to all these, there’s a lot of under-the-hood improvements as well. You can check out the details in the release notes.
Firefox 69 is an impressive update for users concerned about their privacy. Similar to our recommendation on some of the secure email services recently, we recommend you to update your browser to get the best out of it. The new update is already available in most Linux distributions. You just have to update your system.
If you are interested in browsers that block ads and tracking cookies, try open source Brave browser. They are even giving you their own cryptocurrency for using their web browser. You can use it to reward your favorite publishers.
What do you think about this release? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
via: https://itsfoss.com/firefox-69/
作者：Ankush Das 选题：lujun9972 译者：译者ID 校对：校对者ID