Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 70 to the stable channel, bringing a host of important new privacy and security-related features. The single biggest change in the new version is that Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) is on by default on all platforms, bringing privacy protections to all users. Firefox 70 also includes more security protections from Firefox Lockwise, Mozilla’s digital identity and password management tool.
According to the official changelog from Mozilla, the Enhanced Tracking Protection tool in Firefox 70 includes social tracking protection, which blocks cross-site tracking cookies from sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There’s also a Privacy Protections report that shows a detailed overview of the trackers Firefox has blocked. It also reduces power usage in macOS with Core Animations, and provides consolidated reports from Monitor and Lockwise.
According to Mozilla, Lockwise for desktop lets “users create, update, and delete your logins and passwords to sync across all your devices, including the Lockwise mobile apps and Firefox mobile browsers” . Firefox Monitor now also includes Integrated Breach Alerts, which notifies users when saved logins and passwords are compromised in online data breaches. It also generates complex passwords to help users create and save strong passwords for new online accounts.
Alongside all the above features, the new release also has plenty of significant additions for developers, including DOM mutation breakpoints and inactive CSS rule indicators in the DevTools, several new CSS text properties, two-value display syntax and JS numeric separators. It also comes with myriad improvements to core engine, including a faster Javascript Baseline Interpreter to handle the modern web’s large codebases and improve page load performance for a better browsing experience.
