One of the great things about Android is that we have many browsers to choose from, and Firefox is one of those. This week, they announced a new pre-beta that is rolling out with a few new features. Which include a new private browsing mode. Typically, private browsing modes will not keep any trace of your browsing habits on the machine. Now with this new mode that the company is testing out, it will also keep online services from tracking your habits. It’s pretty similar to what other plugins like Privacy Badger and Ghostery already do. However, Firefox now has that combined with their own private browsing mode, so you won’t need another add-on. Which is pretty cool. Currently, this experimental feature is available in the Firefox Developer edition for Linux, Mac and Windows. It’s also available to Android users through the Firefox Aurora channel.
Now with the new signing policy for Add-ons for Firefox, the browser will block all add-ons that are not signed. The company has also created a way to auto-generate signatures that only require an automated review. However, under some circumstances it won’t be that easy for extensions to get signed. The reason for this is to keep malicious extensions and add-ons out of Firefox. While they aren’t that common, they do exist and bring most people a huge headache, for obvious reasons. So it’s just another way that Mozilla is looking to protect their users from malicious extensions.
Currently, it’s still pretty easy for Android users to disable the new signing policy for Add-Ons, but that will likely change in the near future. To where it won’t be easily disabled. As much as users are going to hate it, it’s going to be a good measure to keep everyone safe while browsing through Firefox’s browser. The update is available now, so you can pick it up and try it out on your own.
Remember that this is a pre-beta, which means it’s not even beta and betas have a ton of bugs and stuff. So if you don’t want to be bothered with bugs, just hold out until the final stable release is available. It shouldn’t be too long.