Mozilla has been at the forefront in fight against websites that track users online activities, which tracking is only beneficial to advertisers who target specific users, despite that it invades their privacy.
Now, the company has released Firefox 69 with ability to block third-party tracking cookies by default, which is powered by the new tool called Enhanced Tracking Protection, a step-up from its earlier approach of manually keeping websites and advertisers from tracking users online activity.
While the Enhanced Tracking Protection debuted in Firefox 57 as an option to block website elements (analytics trackers, ads and social share buttons), enabling tracking protection outside of private browsing. It aims to help in mitigating privacy threats and put the users back in control of their online activities without fear of snooping and tracking of their browsing behavior across websites — without knowledge or consent.
Firefox 69 goes even beyond the cookies, as cookies aren't the only tracker that follow users around on the web; it also block Cryptominers, which are capable of accessing the CPU, resulting slow down and fast battery draining, which helps the miners to generate cryptocurrency — certainly not for the user, but for themselves.
Firefox allows you to view those sites that are already blocked via the Blocking Tracking Cookies section, and you can also turn off blocking for specific sites.
The Enhanced Tracking Protection is ultimately aimed at blocking only third-party trackers (ad cookies), as it allow first-party cookies, such as logins, so that you can continue where you last left off, without having to retype passwords.
Mozilla's move to tackle cryptomining, stems from the fact that it uses CPU to generate the cryptocurrency, and fingerprinting that track users across the web. The fingerprinting scripts is capable of harvesting a snapshot of computer’s configuration, which can be used to track a user, without consent.
Firefox users, however can turn on ‘Strict Mode’ to get protection from fingerprinting scripts; albeit Mozilla promises to turn fingerprinting protections on by default in future releases.
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