Home Android What’s in the latest Firefox upgrade? New defense against supercookies

What’s in the latest Firefox upgrade? New defense against supercookies

By
Jeanette Box
-
349
50

Mozilla this week upgraded Firefox to version 85, adding to its overarching emphasis on privacy by isolating supercookies that some sites rely on to track users’ movements on the web.

Engineers also patched 13 vulnerabilities, five of which were marked “High,” Firefox’s second-most-serious label.

Firefox 85 can be downloaded for Windows, macOS, and Linux from Mozilla’s site. Because Firefox updates in the background, most users can simply relaunch the browser to get the latest version. To manually update on Windows, pull up the menu under the three horizontal bars at the upper right, then click the help icon (the question mark within a circle). Choose “About Firefox.” (On macOS, “About Firefox” can be found under the “Firefox” menu.) The resulting page shows that the browser is either up to date or displays the refresh process.

Mozilla upgrades Firefox every four weeks; the last refresh was on Dec. 15.

Stomping on supercookies

Other than the fixes for the baker’s dozen of security flaws, the most notable change in Firefox 85 is a behind-the-scenes expansion of Mozilla’s bet on privacy.

“In Firefox 85, we’re introducing a fundamental change in the browser’s network architecture to make all of our users safer: we now partition network connections and caches by the website being visited,” said Steven Englehardt and Arthur Edelstein, senior privacy engineer and senior product manager, privacy and security, in a Jan. 26 post to a Mozilla blog. “Trackers can abuse caches to create supercookies and can use connection identifiers to track users. But by isolating caches and network connections to the website they were created on, we make them useless for cross-site tracking.”

Mozilla aims to stamp out the dodgy practice of storing user identifiers in “increasingly obscure parts of the browser,” as Englehardt and Edelstein put it, including caches and various types of connections and sessions. Tracking entities have gone to great lengths to hide their trackers as browser makers — Mozilla among them — have blocked more obvious avenues, such as traditional cookies, as they appeal to users’ increasing concerns.

Firefox’s approach, which typically goes by the term Network Partitioning, isolates multiple kinds of caches used by the browser to boost perceived performance by, for instance, drawing on an already-viewed image from a local cache — in memory or perhaps on disk — rather than call it again from its Internet-based source. The goal of caching: save time by eliminating downloads and reserve bandwidth for first-time content retrieval.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

50 COMMENTS

  1. 61758 699757Bookmarked. Please also visit my site. 628552

  9. 331116 922342Normally I dont read write-up on blogs, but I would like to say that this write-up extremely compelled me to try and do so! Your writing style has been amazed me. Thanks, extremely excellent post. 897327

  48. 977721 306847Find out these pointers read on and learn to know how to submit an application performing this that you policy your corporation today. alertpay 89280

  50. 388962 70284Thanks so a lot for an additional post. I be able to get that kind of information info. friend, and exactly. 78276

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here