Mozilla launches Firefox 85 with supercookie protection

[Karlston]

Mozilla launches Firefox 85 with supercookie protection  

 

Mozilla has announced the availability of Firefox 85. The new update brings supercookie protection, better bookmark management, and an option to remove all of your saved logins in the password manager with one click rather than having to delete them one at a time. Today’s update also marks the first Firefox release to ship without support for Adobe Flash which recently reached end-of-life.

 

For years now, Firefox has been positioned itself as the go-to browser for the best privacy protections, it already has strong measures in place to prevent third-party tracking but with today’s update, it will also begin to stymie supercookies. Supercookies are cookies that are used to track you online but stay hidden from the browser, they even stick around after you clear your browser’s cookies. Firefox 85 isolates supercookies so they cannot track and profile you as you go from one website to the next.

 

The biggest visual change that users will see in this update is to the bookmarks bar. Even if you have your bookmarks bar hidden, it’ll still be displayed on new tabs. The firm says that this is the default setting implying that you can hide it on the new tabs page if you don’t like it. A new folder on the toolbar will also give you access to your bookmarks menu.

 

The final change worth mentioning in this update is the ability to delete all of your saved logins with the click of a button. In the past, you’d have to go through the list manually deleting them one by one which was time-consuming if you had lots of logins to go through.

 

If you’re already running Firefox it should update on its own although you can go to the hamburger menu, go to Help and then select About Firefox to get the update now. You will see the update downloading and then a button will appear letting you restart the browser to apply the update. If you’re on Linux, you’ll likely need to wait for your operating system to display the update. If you don’t have Firefox, you can download the latest version now.

 

 

Mozilla launches Firefox 85 with supercookie protection

[MagicSahar]

Quote

Mozilla has released today Firefox 85 to the stable channel, a new version of its beloved browser that removes support for the Adobe Flash Player plugin but also boosts privacy protections by adding more comprehensive defenses against "supercookies."

 

The removal of the Flash plugin comes after Mozilla announced its intention to drop Flash in July 2017 as part of a coordinated industry-wide Flash deprecation and End-of-Life plan, together with Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook.

The EOL date was set to Dec. 31, 2020, a date after which Adobe agreed to stop providing updates for the software.

Firefox now joins Chrome and Edge, both of which removed support for Flash earlier this month with the release of Chrome 88 and Edge 88.

NETWORK PARTITIONING AND SUPERCOOKIES PROTECTION

But even if Firefox 85 is the first version that ships without the much-maligned Flash plugin, the bigger feature in this release is "network partitioning."

First reported by ZDNet last month, the network partitioning feature works by splitting the Firefox browser cache on a per-website basis, a technical solution that prevents websites from tracking users as they move across the web.

In a blog post today, Mozilla said this new feature has effectively blocked the use of supercookies inside Firefox going forward.

 

"Supercookies can be used in place of ordinary cookies to store user identifiers, but they are much more difficult to delete and block," Mozilla said today.

"Over the years, trackers have been found storing user identifiers as supercookies in increasingly obscure parts of the browser, including in Flash storage, ETags, and HSTS flags.

"The changes we're making in Firefox 85 greatly reduce the effectiveness of cache-based supercookies by eliminating a tracker's ability to use them across websites," the browser maker said.

Mozilla said that while they expected a big impact on website performance after splitting the Firefox cache, internal metrics show that the impact was minimal.

"Our metrics show a very modest impact on page load time: between a 0.09% and 0.75% increase at the 80th percentile and below, and a maximum increase of 1.32% at the 85th percentile," Mozilla said.

The browser maker viewed this performance impact as acceptable for improving overall user privacy.

OTHER CHANGES

But other features shipped with Firefox 85 today. The first is a change in how bookmarks are saved inside Firefox.

Starting with this version, Firefox now remembers where users saved their last bookmark and saves all other bookmarks to the same location. 

Furthermore, Firefox has also added a bookmarks folder to the bookmarks toolbar. This last feature caused some problems last week, when some Firefox users saw it in their browsers, but without an easy way of disabling it. With Firefox 85, removing that folder from the bookmarks toolbar is possible via a right-click menu option.

Source

[Karlston]

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