Mozilla’s Firefox Focus web browser can now protect Android users from cross-site tracking while browsing the Internet by preventing the use of cookies for advertising and monitoring your activity.
Firefox Focus is a lightweight browser for mobile platforms (Android and iOS) designed to protect user privacy by blocking ads and content trackers.
Full Cookie Protection, the feature behind this new capability, is designed to force all sites to keep their cookies in separate “jars” to block attempts to follow you around the web and create browsing profiles.
“We are bringing it to Firefox Focus on Android, our simple default privacy companion app. Firefox Focus on Android will be the first Firefox mobile browser to benefit from full cookie protection,” Mozilla said today.
“This will help mitigate cross-site tracking where companies collect information about you, such as the sites you visit every day or the products you search.”
First introduced by Mozilla in February 2021 with Firefox 86 for desktop, this privacy feature does so by telling the browser to thwart the sharing of cookies between websites.
Four months later, in June 2021, Mozilla enabled Full Cookie Protection by default in incognito windows, starting with Firefox 89.
The move is part of a long line of changes Mozilla has made to the Firefox browser while fighting online tracking efforts by ad technology companies.
Two years ago, Mozilla enabled Enhanced Tracking Protection in Firefox by default for automatically block cookies from known trackers.
With the launch of Firefox 72 in January 2020, the web browser also started auto-blocking scripts used for browser fingerprints and additional super-cookie protection to prevent hidden trackers from keeping tabs on user web activity, starting with Firefox 85.
“By combining total cookie protection with super-cookie protections, you can allay your concerns about businesses following you from site to site by using Firefox Focus on Android” Mozilla added today.
Support for SmartBlock, a mechanism that ensures that full cookie protection does not harm websites when blocking tracking scripts, was also added to Firefox Focus for Android in December.
