Mozilla cracks down on supercookies with Firefox 85

Mozilla on Tuesday detailed what’s new in Firefox 85, which we talked about last week when the update was detailed on Android. There are a lot of changes in this update, but one of the biggest is Firefox’s crackdown on “supercookies.”

Firefox has already gone to great lengths to block cookies, and the newest update makes the browser even more private and secure. Changes made in Firefox 85 will make the browsing experience even safer by partitioning network connections and caches by the website being visited.

“Firefox now protects you from supercookies, a type of tracker that can stay hidden in your browser and track you online, even after you clear cookies,” Mozilla explains in a blog post. “By isolating supercookies, Firefox prevents them from tracking your web browsing from one site to the next.”

Mozilla claims Firefox 85 greatly reduces the effectiveness of cache-based supercookies by eliminating a tracker’s ability to use them across websites. The update partitions all of the following caches by the top-level site being visited: HTTP cache, image cache, favicon cache, HSTS cache, OCSP cache, style sheet cache, font cache, DNS cache, HTTP Authentication cache, Alt-Svc cache, and TLS certificate cache.

Mozilla said Firefox 85 also partitions pooled connections, prefetch connections, preconnect connections, speculative connections, and TLS identifiers. “This partitioning applies to all third-party resources embedded on a website, regardless of whether Firefox considers that resource to have loaded from a tracking domain.”

Firefox 85 also makes it easier to save and access your bookmarks, drops support for Adobe Flash, and the password manager now allows you to remove all your saved logins with one click. Before, you had to delete each login individually.

These updates are an appetizer for a larger update to come in Firefox 90, which is expected to be released in mid-May. When the update arrives, it will introduce a redesign that tweaks the browser UI, including visual changes to the New Tab page and the hamburger menu.

You can download Firefox 85 for your device of choice now and start protecting your web browsing from supercookies.

Firefox Browser: fast, private & safe web browser (Free, Google Play) →

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