Firefox browsers will be blocking any form of crypto mining or harmful practices on their platforms from now on, announced Mozilla on Thursday. The decision is said to be a step towards protecting the users (data) and ‘giving them a voice’.
The practice has already been made available in Firefox Nightly for users to try out, by stripping cookies and blocking storage access. Future releases Firefox 63 and Firefox 65 will also bring this protection by blocking slow-loading trackers by default, which will be after the company runs a shield study to test the experience with some of the beta users in September.
Source: blog.mozilla.org
“Deceptive practices that invisibly collect identifiable user information or degrade user experience are becoming more common. For example, some trackers fingerprint users — a technique that allows them to invisibly identify users by their device properties, and which users are unable to control. Other sites have deployed crypto mining scripts that silently mine cryptocurrencies on the user’s device. Practices like these make the web a more hostile place to be. Future versions of Firefox will block these practices by default.”, wrote Nick Nguyen on the official Mozilla blog.
The company states a study by Ghostery which says that 55.4% of the total time required to load an average website is spent loading third-party trackers. Usually, users are not aware of these third-party scripts that hamper with their user experience and collect their browsing data. The vision propagated here is the privacy of the user and their protection of data and information.
Opera was reportedly the first major browser to implement these data protection protocols and in January, it announced that it will bring the same protections for its mobile browsers too. In the past, Google took a step towards preventing data mining when it banned all crypto mining apps from the Play Store.
Download the Firefox browsers here, or try out the protections in the Firefox Nightly Control Center Menu.
