Mozilla today has released Firefox 70 to the public. The update brings new privacy protections, dramatic performance improvements on macOS, and more. For Mozilla, the big focus is on privacy improvements and blocking trackers.
Last year, Mozilla released Firefox 63 with Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers. Since then, the company has been iterating on its privacy features, and Firefox 70 continues that. First off, Firefox 70.0 includes social tracking protection.
This blocks cross-site tracking cookies from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Users can customize this setting, with the default option being “balanced for protection and performance.” If you set your Enhanced Tracking Protection settings to “strict,” you’ll successfully block more trackers, but some websites may break completely.
Another new feature in Firefox 70 is an all-new privacy protections dashboard that “reveals who’s trying to track you behind the scenes and helps you stop them.” Here’s how Mozilla describes this:
The Privacy Protections report shows an overview, with details, of the trackers Firefox has blocked. It provides consolidated reports from Monitor and Lockwise.
Furthermore, for macOS users, Firefox 70 includes dramatic improvements to power consumption and performance. Mozilla says that Firefox 70 “improves power usage by 3x or more for many use cases.” This is because the company “changed how pixels get to the screen,” which allows the app to do less work per frame.
In Firefox 70 we changed how pixels get to the screen on macOS. This allows us to do less work per frame when only small parts of the screen change.
In short, Firefox 70 improves power usage by 3x or more for many use cases. The larger the Firefox window and the smaller the animation, the bigger the difference. Users have reported much longer battery life, cooler machines and less fan spinning.
The latest version of Firefox is available now for macOS and iOS from the App Store.
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