Firefox 69 Blocks Tracking Cookies, Crypto-mining

The Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox 69 for Microsoft Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android, with improvements to protect end-users.

The Firefox 69 browser includes the blocking of third-party tracking cookies and cryptomining, as well as performance improvements on Windows 10. Mac OS users should see better battery life, and permission has to be obtained before Adobe Flash is turned on.

Earlier this week Microsoft confirmed plans to ditch Adobe Flash from its Chromium-based Edge browser.

Tracking cookies

Mozilla opened up also the new features in Firefox 69 in a blog posting, in which it talked about the “enhanced tracking protection” in the new browser.

“For today’s release, Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be turned on by default for all users worldwide as part of the ‘Standard’ setting in the Firefox browser and will block known “third-party tracking cookies” according to the Disconnect list,” said Mozilla.

Mozilla said it had enabled the default feature for new users in June this year.

“Currently over 20 percent of Firefox users have Enhanced Tracking Protection on,” said Mozilla. “With today’s release, we expect to provide protection for 100 percent of our users by default.”

Mozilla said said that Enhanced Tracking Protection works behind-the-scenes to keep a company from forming a profile of the user based on their tracking of the user’s browsing behaviour across websites – often without your knowledge or consent.

These profiles and the data is often sold to third parties or used for other purposes.

“Enhanced Tracking Protection helps to mitigate this threat and puts you back in control of your online experience,” said Mozilla. “You’ll know when Enhanced Tracking Protection is working when you visit a site and see a shield icon in the address bar.”

Other features

Other changes for Firefox see an improvement to the Block Autoplay feature, which gives users the capability to block any video that automatically starts playing.

Windows 10 users will see performance and user interface improvements, and for MacOS users download UI and battery life has been improved.

The latest version of Firefox can be downloaded here.

In June Mozilla unveiled the new logo and branding for Firefox, that shows that the well-regarded browser used by 250 million people, now offers much more than just web surfing.

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