Firefox 69 Released with Default Tracking Protection Enabled.
The famed open-source browser, Firefox lands its latest release 69 with some major privacy focused changes for its users.
Table of Contents
Firefox 69 Web Browser – New Features
Enhanced Tracking Protection
Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) feature is now enabled by default for all users in Firefox 69. This makes users bit more safe on the web and a step towards right direction for the safety of your data and how you are being tracked.
Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) now blocks third-party tracking cookies and cryptominers. There is an optional strict setting also available which blocks fingerprinters as well.
Block Autoplay Videos
This feature is a blessings for the users. Firefox users now have options to block those automatically playing videos in some websites for advertisements. You can have it turned on via settings and add exceptions for websites as well to allow autoplaying videos. This is a much needed feature for the users considering privacy and data bandwidth.
Web Authentication and Video Conferencing Support
Support for the Web Authentication HmacSecret extension via Windows Hello now comes with this release, for versions of Windows 10 May 2019 or newer, enabling more passwordless experiences on the web.
Support for receiving multiple video codecs with this release makes it easier for WebRTC conferencing services to mix video from different clients.
JIT support comes to ARM64 for improved performance of our JavaScript Optimizing JIT compiler.
Improvements for Windows 10 and macOS
There are some more improvements for the Windows 10 users and macOS users:
Firefox will give Windows hints to appropriately set content process priority levels, meaning more processor time spent on the tasks you’re actively working on, and less processor time spent on things in the background (with the exception of video and audio playback).
For our existing Windows 10 users, you can easily find and launch Firefox from a shortcut on the Win10 taskbar.
macOS users on dual-graphics-card machines (like MacBook Pro) will switch back to the low-power GPU more aggressively, saving battery life.
Finder on macOS now displays download progress for files being downloaded.
Along with above new features, there are plenty of security bug fixes which comes with this release. You can read them here.
Whatโs Changed
The “Always Activate” option for Flash plugin content has been removed. Firefox will now always ask for user permission before activating Flash content on a website.
Firefox no longer loads userChrome.css or userContent.css by default improving start-up performance. Users who wish to customize Firefox by using these files can set the toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets preference to true to restore this ability.
How to Download and Upgrade to Firefox 69
If you are a Windows 10 or macOS user, you can get the auto upgrade option from Help -> About dialog in your already existing Firefox install.
If you need a fresh copy of Firefox 69, you can go to below official download page.
For Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distributions, you have to wait till official packages are updated with Firefox 69.
