Firefox 70 brings Enhanced Tracking Protection and longer battery life
Enlarge / Mozilla is taking a pretty huge bite out of the current generation of tracking tools. Let the arms race continue! (credit: Mozilla)
Yesterday, Mozilla released Firefox 70. The newest version of the most-popular fully open source browser expands on the Enhanced Tracking Protection we saw as an option in Firefox 69 and turns that protection on by default for all users. We already saw most of these new features in our Firefox 70 beta coverage, but since then, the features have been expanded upon and fine-tuned, and major new features have appeared or have been added in the Lockwise online password manager for users who have a Firefox cloud account.
To access a Protection Report showing you all the nefarious items Firefox has blocked, click the shield icon to the left of the progress bar, and you'll find the link to the report at the bottom of the drop-down. [credit: Mozilla ]
In addition to automatically generating pseudorandom passwords for you, saving them, and automatically filling out login forms with them, Lockwise continuously scans the Internet for password and database dumps that might contain leaked copies of your credentials. Lockwise does this by comparing a hash of each of your passwords to hashes of the passwords in the dumps and leaks-so you don't have to worry about Mozilla itself, or its employees, "knowing" your password.
We really like David Murphy of Lifehacker's idea of setting Firefox's homepage to about:protections. That way, the Privacy Report becomes the content of any new tab created before you actually head to a website. This makes it that much more likely you'll actually see the information and notice everything from changes to how sites are tracking you to whether your credentials have been leaked somewhere.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments