Mozilla Firefox 111 It has already been published as the new stable version of the well-known web browser, which this time comes with few interesting new features, to the point that Android users are the ones who have apparently benefited the most.
As far as the desktop versions of Firefox go, the only thing that stands out is that the support for native Windows notifications is now enabled. This is not a revolutionary addition, but one that should offer or at least give the feeling of having a more integrated experience with Microsoft’s operating system, which currently continues to accrue to the majority of Firefox users despite the fact that it is on Linux where the application has its most loyal followers.
The other major new feature in Firefox 111 is that Firefox Relay users can now choose to create Relay mailmasks directly from the application’s credential manager, although to do so requires a Firefox account login. On the other hand, support for two languages has been added: Friulan and Sardinian.
With desktop builds (Windows, Linux, and macOS) arriving with little to no interest, the best part this time goes to users of Android, which from now on have Total Cookie Protection available in the standard version of the browser. Such a feature was already present on desktop builds in Firefox Focus, the privacy-focused variant of the app, but now comes standard to be available to all users.
Total Cookie Protection, or total protection against cookies, is a feature developed by Mozilla to prevent cross-tracking of cookies by websites. To do this, what it does is isolate the cookies used by a website in its own “jar”, thus preventing them from being tracked by other websites. In this way, for example, Facebook is prevented from having access to the cookies generated and stored after visiting Amazon. The following drawing published by Mozilla explains in a simple way the operation of the total protection against cookies.
The barrier represented by Total Cookie Protection is not perfect, but it is better than nothing and at least represents an obstacle in order to reinforce, even a little, the privacy of the user. Mozilla explains that the purpose of its approach is to strike a “balance between removing the worst privacy properties of third-party cookies, particularly the ability to track you, and allowing those cookies to do their least intrusive use cases (for example, to provide accurate analyses).
Details about Mozilla Firefox 111 are available in the release notes, while the app can be obtained for Windows, macOS, and Linux from the corresponding download section. If you have it installed, your update can be forced by following the route Main Menu > Help > “About Firefox”, although in the case of Linux the logical thing to do is to wait for it to arrive through the repositories of the distribution, Snap and/or Flathub (Flatpack). In Android, his thing is that it is supplied through the Google Play Store.
