Mozilla has announced a new feature in Firefox Nightly that can lets users block of fingerprinting and cryptomining.
To prevent the ability for others to track users’ web browsers and generate cryptocurrency for others, Firefox collaborated with Disconnect — a company that offers protection against tracking — to collect lists of domains with tracking features and provide users with the options to block these scripts in Firefox Nightly and Beta versions.
In the blogpost, Mozilla also explained both scripts to give more insights on what fingerprinting and cryptomining scripts are. According to the company, “‘fingerprinting’ scripts are invisibly embedded on many web pages” which can keep a computer’s configuration to be tracked when users are surfing the web. On the other hand, cryptomining allow ‘cryptominers’ to take advantage of user’s web browser and computer’s CPU to generate cryptocurrency for others, leading to their battery being easily drained, their computer slowing down, and the electric bill hiking up.
To prevent these unethical occasions from happening, users can enable both fingerprinting and cryptomining protection in Firefox Nightly 68 and Beta 67. The protection feature is currently under testing period and once it’s improved, it will be enabled to all Firefox users.