Enhanced Privacy with Mozilla’s Upcoming Stealth Mode.
The company is testing enhancements to private browsing in Firefox designed to block website elements that could be used by third parties to track browsing behavior across sites. Mozilla is testing a new private browsing mode in Firefox that doesn’t just keep no trace of your porn browsing habits on your machine but that also blocks online services that could track you while you’re surfing the web. That’s not unlike what plug-ins like Ghostery and the EFF’s Privacy Badger can do for you, but Firefox now combines that with its own incognito mode. You can say goodbye to those embarrassing moments when your boss calls you into his office saying that he can easily see what you’re doing in that incognito mode. This new experimental feature is now available in the Firefox Developer Edition for Windows, Mac and Linux, as well as the Firefox Aurora channel on Android. “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,” the Firefox team writes today.
Mozilla states the feature will make sure that all content that tries to profile an user will be automatically blocked such as analytics, social and other services that might be collecting data without your knowledge. “All major browsers offer some form of experience that is labeled ‘private’ but this is typically intended to solve the ‘local’ privacy case, namely preventing others on a shared computer from seeing traces of your online activity. This is a useful solution for many users, but we’re experimenting with ways to offer you even more control when they open Private windows,” the browser developer writes on its blog. To this extent, wouldn’t you like a true private browsing experience for those times in which you really don’t want anyone to pry into what you’re doing? If you’ve ever used a plug-in with this kind of functionality, you’ve probably seen sites that simply break under the unbearable pressure of not being able to track you.
Most private browsing modes today – be they Firefox’s private window, Chrome’s incognito mode, or Internet Explorer’s invisible mode – are not that private in the end. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, meanwhile, is trying to develop a new standard for the “Do Not Track” browser setting to make it more effective. Needless to say, websites couldn’t care less, and ads on those websites don’t even have the algorithm to care: they get your IP regardless of anything you would do. Electrolysis runs content in a separate process from the main browser and should make sure the browser remains responsive even when the content process isn’t.
Mozilla’s making the assumption (a safe one) that if you’ve consciously clicked in to a private window that you really, really want your privacy respected. Then again, they may have decided to throw down the gauntlet since their last collaboration attempt intended to help users avoid unwanted tracking was battered into complete uselessness. The new option that will probably soon be available in Firefox will stop ads on websites from tracking you, will hide your fingerprint, and will block add-ons that do not meet privacy requirements.