Unlike Chrome, Firefox still maintains the speed, security, stability, and customizability that launched its popularity. It also makes it easy to modify your privacy settings, whether through customization options or third-party extensions.
Let’s take a look at how you can bring Firefox to new heights of privacy, all while using simple tweaks within Firefox’s settings.
Why Use Firefox?
Firefox’s foundation lies in its open-source nature. This makes it completely transparent while nurturing thousands of developers across platforms contributing to its development. This means that Firefox is:
Owned by a non-profit company, Mozilla. Holds a massive number of extensions for every usage scenario. Completely open-source and free, allowing for a high-degree of customizability. Outside the ecosystem of giant corporations who are in the business of selling your data.
Firefox also has built-in security and privacy features that make it easy to create an incognito browsing experience. There are always some quick privacy tweaks you can make as well.
These privacy measures come out-of-the-box, and we’ll show you how you can fortify them even further.
1. Fortify Your Firefox Browsing by Tweaking the Settings
As is always the case, everything in life is about compromise. If you want to give up some measure of convenience for the sake of privacy and security, you have to disable some features.
2. Hardening Firefox With the “About:config” Tweak
So far, we have hardened Firefox using options that are clearly visible within its interface. However, more advanced security and privacy options are hiding under Firefox’s hood. Copy and paste (or type) “about:config” into the address bar to open them up.
Uncheck the warning box, and click on the Accept the Risk and Continue. What we are interested to find is all references to “telemetry,” so type it into the search filter bar. Double-click on the following results, and change their values to false:
browser. newtabpage. activity-stream. feeds. telemetry browser. newtabpage. activity-stream. telemetry browser. ping-centre. telemetry toolkit. telemetry. archive. enabled toolkit. telemetry. bhrPing. enabled toolkit. telemetry. enabled toolkit. telemetry. firstShutdownPing. enabled toolkit. telemetry. hybridContent. enabled toolkit. telemetry. newProfilePing. enabled toolkit. telemetry. reportingpolicy. firstRun toolkit. telemetry. shutdownPingSender. enabled toolkit. telemetry. unified toolkit. telemetry. updatePing. enabled
Now, click on toolkit.telemetry.server and delete its value box content. This will permanently disable any transmission of telemetry data between your browser and Mozilla, or anyone else who may be tapping into Mozilla.
Moving on from telemetry, now we search for “experiments” references. These refer to Mozilla’s studies and test features, but they also create a collection of data that you do not want to accumulate. Accordingly, double-click on the following results to change them to false:
experiments. activeExperiment experiments. enabled experiments. supported network. allow-experiments
Lastly, you should disable networking prefetching by typing “prefetch” into the search filter. This is important because, as the word implies, it prefetches cookies from sites to load. Sometimes, it may speed up browsing, but it also may invite unwelcome scrutiny. You should arrange them with the following values:
network. dns. disablePrefetch = true network. dns. disablePrefetchFromHTTPS = true network. predictor. enabled = false network. predictor. enable-prefetch = false network. prefetch-next = false
3. Importing an Already-Hardened Firefox Profile
There are other options to explore if you are going for maximum security. However, it would be more time-saving to implement these features in bulk. One neat way of doing this is to override your own Firefox configuration profile with one that is already maximally security-oriented, like this one.
Simply download it into your Firefox profile folder and unzip it. Depending on your operating system, here is where you should unzip the files:
Once you have unzipped the downloaded profile, you need to make a default profile for your Firefox browser. Do so by typing “about:profiles” in your address bar, and hit Create a New Profile.
You will be prompted to point to the folder of your new Firefox profile folder, which you have already done. It should be named “user.js-master.”
And that’s it. You can now make it your default profile with all the maximum security measures without manually shifting values for dozens of settings.
Browsing Securely With Firefox
Without using any extensions, you can make Firefox into a formidable privacy-enforcing internet browser. We recommend that you use all the above methods for the most private browsing experience.
Of course, there are thousands of quality-of-life improvements you can still make by taking advantage of Firefox’s rich extension repository. Truly, few other browsers can boast to have this level of extensive customizability while remaining open-source and unaffiliated to moneyed interests.
