Today, Mozilla announced a host of privacy-oriented improvements to its Firefox suite of products, starting with the Firefox browser. Starting today, new users will have a new feature called "enhanced tracking protection" turned on by default, meaning that known third-party tracking cookies will be blocked by default.
Existing users will see it being turned on over the next few months, but they can also turn it on manually. You can enable it in the content blocking settings, by selecting the "Custom" option and then checking the "Cookies" checkbox.
There"s more good news for the privacy-conscious with an update to the Facebook Container extension. Essentially, this extension aims to block Facebook tracking to follow you across other websites, and with this new update, it"ll block the social network from tracking you in websites that use its social sharing features.
That means that websites that display Facebook"s Like button, for example, will have it disabled, and so Facebook won"t be able to know you"ve visited it. For non-Facebook users, this means the social network can"t build a shadow profile of you without you even accessing the website.
Mozilla also announced that Firefox Lockbox, which was born as an iOS app to help you manage and use passwords saved to your Firefox account, is now being called Firefox Lockwise. In addition to being available for iPhone, iPad, and Android, it"s now available as an extension for the desktop version of Firefox. This means you can access and manage your passwords more easily from more places.
Lastly, Mozilla announced some improvements to Firefox Monitor, which launched late last year to notify users when their e-mail was part of a known data breach. Now, the Monitor has a dashboard that helps users manage multiple e-mail addresses from a single page.