Firefox will protect your privacy by blocking cross-site tracking by default

Firefox is one of the best web browsers for the privacy-conscious. With a litany of privacy protecting features along with a great development team behind it, it’s right up there as being one of the best browsers available. Not just on Android either, but on your laptop or desktop computer as well. Mozilla has now announced that a number of new features will be introduced in the coming months to enhance your privacy. Those features include the blocking of cross-site trackers by default.

Cross-site trackers don’t only pose a privacy concern, but they can slow down page-loading as well. In fact, a study by Ghostery (via DigitalTrends) has shown that 55.4% of the average time to load a site was spent loading trackers. While it’s not such a big deal for those who have fast internet connections, those with slower ones will struggle to load modern sites. Disabling trackers means your privacy can be maintained while also improving page load time. These trackers are separate to cross-site trackers, and will only be blocked if they are found to be harmful to page loading times. Both cross-site trackers and page-load-time-affecting trackers have been disabled in the latest Firefox Nightly update, so you can actually try that out now. If you would rather not update to the latest nightly builds, here’s how to disable cross-site trackers now, according to Mozilla.

Manually Disable Slow-loading or Cross-site trackers in Firefox

You can control both features from the Control Center menu, accessible on the left-hand side of the address bar. In that menu, you’ll see a new “Content Blocking” section. From there, you can:

1. Open the Control Center menu on the left-hand side of the address bar.
2. Open the “Content Blocking” section.
3. Enable blocking of slow-loading trackers or cross-site trackers by clicking “Add Blocking…” next to the option.
4. Furthermore, in the “Content Blocking” preferences:
   1. Click the checkbox next to “Slow-Loading Trackers”  to improve page load performance.
   2. Click the checkbox next to “Third-Party Cookies” and select “Trackers (recommended)” to block cross-site tracking cookies.
5. You can disable these protections by clicking the gear icon in the control center and unchecking the checkboxes next to “Slow-Loading Trackers” and “Third-party Cookies”.

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Another feature Mozilla teased will come in a future version. Cryptominers will be blocked automatically, along with fingerprinting practices that allow trackers to identify you by your device’s properties. Usually, the end-user doesn’t have control over these tracking methods, and they make the web a lot more of a hostile place. It’s great that users will have more control over their own privacy, and hopefully, it gets even better in the future.