Firefox 42 with new “private” mode available in Beta test

After the release of the latest stable version of Firefox 41 the day before yesterday, September 22, Mozilla published the following beta version of its browser - Firefox 42 . The product is available for testing on all major platforms: Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. The forty-second version of the browser carries a lot of innovations and a couple of killer features, including an experimental private mode of browsing the web with protection from tracking the user.

Of the new features of the forty-second version, it is he who is of the greatest interest to the general public, the new private mode of browsing the web. Firefox will not just “not save” your browsing history, cookies, and cache, as Chrome does, for example, but will block user activity tracking with internal protection.

Thus, while working in Firefox 42 in private mode, the various methods of collecting your data and information about your activity that are practiced on the Internet under the guise of “collecting statistics” will stop working for you. The new built-in browser functionality can be compared with AdBlock, crossed with such add-ons that provide online privacy, such as Ghostery and Badger , which do not allow the collection of your personal data. This functionality has been available since August in Firefox Developer Edition for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms, and now it has come to the official beta version of the browser, including on Android.

Here's how the developers at Mozilla comment on the innovations:

You’re not sure what you’re looking for. It has been shown that it can be used to make it possible. This would be a collection of data services.

Transfer:

Our hypothesis is that when you open the Private Browsing mode in Firefox, you send a signal that you want more control over the privacy of your data than any other browser can give you today. The experimental mode incognito is already ready for testing and actively blocks elements of sites that can collect information about your actions. The block includes such elements as information about the content of the web page, action analytics, social services and others - something that can collect information about you without your knowledge.

The new private mode has a security and privacy control center, which is located in the browser menu (burger-button in three bars in the upper right corner). The “New Private Window” button launches the private viewing mode and activates the protection, a message about which is displayed on the screen. After that, you just need to continue working on the web, as usual.
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With these innovations, Mozilla is trying to bring browsing privacy to a new level. The company sees a large amount of positive feedback from Firefox users regarding this trend, especially from those who have protected their personal data using various extensions and methods previously.

In addition to the new "whistles" in the form of a private mode, there are other changes. For example, the forty-second version has better performance. With the protection mode enabled, the top 200 news resources show a decrease in page load time by an average of 44 percent, while the volume of downloadable traffic has decreased by an average of 39 percent.

Also in the beta version of Firefox, a new feature is available for the page’s “mute”. The introduction of this feature in the future was reported back in July and now, finally, it is implemented in beta forty-second version. The function shows the audio playback icon, as in Chrome, by clicking on which you can turn off the sound coming from the tab, which will be very useful when surfing through pages with aggressive advertising or just in a situation “yes, where does this music play !?” without the need close the whole page.



In fairness it should be noted that in terms of "mute" pages Mozilla does not claim to originality. This functionality was previously available in the form of extensions or browser settings, for example, in Google Chrome you can activate page “mute” by clicking on the audio icon on the tab in chrome: // flags / (enter in the address bar), but “boxed” This functionality was not.

A complete list of changes that will be of interest to the developer can be found here .

When will the release of the forty-second version of Firefox as the main, Mozilla has not yet reported.

Download links for Windows:
Firefox 42 beta RU
Firefox 42 beta RU x64
Firefox 42 beta en-us
Firefox 42 beta en-us x64

Firefox 42 developer RU
Firefox 42 developer RU x64
Firefox 42 developer en-US
Firefox 42 developer en-US x64

Download links for Linux :
Firefox 42 beta RU
Firefox 42 beta RU x64
Firefox 42 beta en-us
Firefox 42 beta en-us x64

Firefox 42 developer RU
Firefox 42 developer RU x64
Firefox 42 developer en-US
Firefox 42 developer en-US x64