I have long considered Mozilla Firefox to be a good, mainstream, privacy-conscious alternative to Google Chrome. I used it for a long time until the Google ecosystem became too comprehensive to ignore. However, in recent years, the yellow browser seemed to have lost its focus on privacy, leaving it the same as other popular options. So this is good news and perhaps confirmation for those who were still holding out hope for Firefox that it will extending fingerprint protection.
This means it extends its protection against websites that connect you to a “secret digital ID” by “collecting subtle details of your configuration – from your time zone to operating system settings – that together create a ‘fingerprint’ identifiable across websites and browser sessions.”
The company claims that thanks to “global analysis… Firefox is the first browser with this level of fingerprint visibility and the most effective security measures to reduce it.”
Mozilla’s methods generally boil down to giving websites as much general information about your device and system as possible, while balancing that with the real benefits of having websites know some of these details. More specifically, Mozilla claims Firefox will do the following:
- Report your machine as having a quad-core or octa-core processor
- Don’t utilize locally installed fonts to render text on a page
- Report the “available” screen resolution as normal resolution minus 48 pixels
- Only report touchless, one-touch, or five-touch inputs on trackpads
- Input random data into “canvas elements” (background images) when the site reads the image
These changes are only available in Private Browsing and Strict ETP modes, but that’s only “while we work to enable them by default.”
This is probably good news for those who previously considered Firefox to be one of the last bastions of online privacy. This is a welcome change from other changes Mozilla has made over the last year or two.
Last year, Firefox got rid of the Do Not Track (DNT) setting and replaced it with Global Privacy Controls (GPC), which meant moving away from asking sites not to track you and instead asking them to simply not sell or share that data. GPC is more of a standard than DNT, so from that perspective the move made sense, but it signaled somewhat of an abandonment of the push to ask sites not to track users at all.
Earlier this year, Mozilla also tried to add some Terms of Use to Firefox that included a section that appeared to give the company broad powers over user data, and removed an FAQ section that promised not to sell user data.
Mozilla responded to this backlash and stated that all of this “DOES NOT give us ownership of your data or the right to use it for purposes other than those described in the Privacy Notice.” However, many were not convinced and pointed to the unclear wording of these terms.
With all this in mind, it’s nice to see Mozilla once again expanding the online privacy market. Maybe it’s time for me to give the senior browser, my quasi-namesake, another chance.
The best PC gaming kit of 2025
