Mozilla is testing private browsing enhancements for Firefox to give secretive users invisibility from website services that track their browsing activity and collect their data. This would go a step beyond the current private browsing mode, which simply turns a blind eye to and forgets about the sites a user visits during a private session.
“Our hypothesis is that when you open a Private Browsing window in Firefox you’re sending a signal that you want more control over your privacy than current private browsing experiences actually provide,” according to Mozilla’s blog post about the experimental enhancements, which block site elements like content, analytics, social, and other services that might furtively collect a user’s browsing data.
Mozilla warns that pre-beta testers who want to test the private browsing enhancements may encounter sites that look broken because of tracking elements that are blocked. The solution is to unblock these particular sites if a user wants to view it properly.
“Private Browsing in pre-beta Firefox also has a Control Center that contains important site security and privacy controls in a single place,” Mozilla notes in its blog post.
Mozilla also announced a process to verify that installed Firefox add-ons satisfy safety guidelines and criteria. This add-on verification is enabled by default in the pre-beta version of Firefox.
These enhancements are available in the Firefox Developer Edition for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Firefox Aurora on Android.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently released its Privacy Badger 1.0 extension for Chrome and Firefox, which “blocks some of the sneakiest trackers that spy on your Web browsing habits.”
