How To Guide: Hardening Mozilla Firefox Quantum For Privacy & Security 2018 Edition

[tao]

Welcome to our 2018 guide for hardening Firefox Quantum against security and privacy threats. This guide is intended to show users how to modify Firefox settings to resist surveillance by governments and corporations, to increase the strength of the encryption while browsing and to reduce the amount of data leaking from your browser.

 

Important changes since the previous 2014 edition:
-The recommendation for Adblock Plus has been changed to µBlock Origin. This is because Adblock Plus is whitelisting ad domains and not blocking all ads. Adblock Edge, an alternative, is also being discontinued. µBlock also uses less resources than Adblock Plus. 
-The recommendation for NoScript has been changed to uMatrix. This is because NoScript at the time of this writing has re-written their code to support Firefox Quantum, but many of the major security features that made it stand out are no longer present. Also, the new interface is harder to use for managing specific scripts and temporary permissions.
-We have dropped the recommendation for CipherFox as Firefox has improved the browser to allow similar functionality without the add-on.
-The recommendation for Ghostery has been changed to Disconnect. This is because Ghostery has poor default settings and because it is maintained by a web marketing company.
-We have added a method for disabling WebRTC.
-We have added the recommendation for the EFF's Privacy Badger.
-We have added the recommendation for Mozilla's Lightbeam.
-We have added a segment on managing trusted CAs to reduce the risks of Man In The Middle attacks.
-We have significantly reworked the section on managing about:config settings to address all of the major feature changes with Firefox Quantum (version 57+)
-We have added a way to manually enable fingerprinting resistance.
-We have added a method for disabling speech recognition.
-We have added ways to disable multiple types of telemetry (data gathering).
-We have removed the section on disabling RC4 (Firefox removed RC4 support).

 

This guide is effective. You can see the results in a separate article here:
https://vikingvpn.com/blogs/security/visualizing-how-you-are-being-tracked-using-mozilla-lightbeam

 

Getting Started:
This guide assumes that you have already installed Firefox and are using it as your primary browser. Following this entire guide should take 25 to 40 minutes.

 

If interested, please read the entire guide < here >.

[MuGi]

Wow it never occurred to me that they updated their guide.

I used 2014 guide few years ago, and never bothered to check it for update.

 

thanks alot!