Firefox continues to increase protection against Fingerprinting and Cryptocurrency Mining

With a commitment to protecting user privacy, Mozilla recently announced that it will introduce several new ways for the Firefox browser. As previously suggested in the bug report in the Bugzilla tracker, Firefox will increase the protection against fingerprinting and cryptocurrency mining.

Mozilla explained in an official blog post that,

“A variety of popular “fingerprinting” scripts are invisibly embedded on many web pages, harvesting a snapshot of your computer’s configuration to build a digital fingerprint that can be used to track you across the web, even if you clear your cookies. Fingerprinting violates Firefox’s anti-tracking policy.

Another category of scripts called “cryptominers” run costly operations on your web browser without your knowledge or consent, using the power of your computer’s CPU to generate cryptocurrency for someone else’s benefit. These scripts slow down your computer, drain your battery and rack up your electric bill.”

To solve these two problems, Mozilla worked with Disconnect to create a blacklist that lists the domain sites that use the script, and the user can choose to block one or block it altogether. This feature is currently available in the 68 version of the Nightly channel and the 67 version of the Beta channel. It is currently disabled by default and will be enabled by default once reliability and stability are tested.