True private browsing experience has arrived in the latest version of Firefox for Android and is out available in the Beta release. Mozilla of late has become very committed on 2 things which are privacy and security. For addressing the concern, Mozilla has changed the “private browsing mode” which is more or less similar to incognito mode in Chrome. Firefox will make sure in private browsing mode that the web history is kept anonymous and not shared even the web trackers. This is not with case with chrome as it just protects web history in incognito mode from getting accessed by other users.
Tracking Protection:
Firefox also added the tracking protection which is enabled by default in the private browsing. Since this feature will break some of the elements in the web page, the feature is given to users to turn ON/ OFF depending on the requirement. This feature can be enabled/ disabled from the top left portion, by tapping on the shield icon. Once tapped on the dialog protection, you can check on the status of tracking protection. You may also choose to disable this option from the bottom portion of the pop up.
These new improvements are being incorporated in the v42 of Firefox and is only available in the Aurora release channel which is just one step above from nightly in terms of stability. One can also manually enable the tracking protection within and from outside of private browsing by entering “about:config” in the address bar and pressing on enter to find preferences named “privacy.trackingprotection.enabled” and “privacy.trackingprotection.pbmode.enabled.” which needs to be set at “True”.
Add-On Signing:
Firefox also introduced the add-on signing capability under which firefox add on verifies with browser on whether this is the genuine version of extension or not. It has been couple of months that a cryptographic signature is packaged with add-ons in firefox. When every add-on has a signature, they can act to block a malicious one that beat the other precautions conveniently.
This feature is currently only available in Android smart devices, going down the line, this feature will also be extended to the desktop versions as well.
