Mozilla Firefox announced that it will be rolling out new forward-thinking changes over the course of the next three months that will include blocking unconsented and illicit crypto mining activities and third-party trackers. In addition to that, the new features will tackle data breaches and will be aimed at preventing threat actors from performing any nefarious activities.
According to the announcement distributed on August 30th, Mozilla will offer new blocking crypto jacking scripts that will prevent any miners to leverage users’ computer resources for crypto mining purposes. Mozilla revealed that there have been reports if such activities on devices of unsuspecting victims. Major competitors of Mozilla, Google Chrome and Opera browsers, have already implemented strong measures to limit the spread of this phenomenon.
Mozilla plans to respond to this threads and take a strong position against the problems that users are facing such as crypto mining: the new open-source version of the web browser will provide features that will be blocking such crypto jacking attempts.
A recent study conducted by Ghostery suggests that nearly 55.4% of the total time taken to download a page is ‘stolen’ by third-party trackers. Director of Ghostery product management department, Jeremy Tillman shared, “We were fairly confident that websites perform better and work faster when trackers are blocked. The purpose of the study was really trying to quantify that impact. Is it a minor thing, is it somewhere rare, or is it a major thing that’s widespread?”
The new security feature that Mozilla launches is called Firefox Nightly. It is aimed at blocking parasitic trackers from anchoring page loads.
According to the company, the new feature has to go through a testing period in a program called “Shield Study”. Whether the feature will be released to the general public or hold out will depend on the feedback from the audience that will try it out.
The company revealed that the ad-blocking feature that was initially released in 2004, was helping people to not only improved users’ overall experience but it also the advertisements began to care about the users’ experiences too.
