Firefox extensions
Let’s defend our browsing with some pointy plugins that’ll keep the wolves at bay.
The world isn’t going to end when Google pulls the plug on Manifest V2 for Chrome, so let’s investigate the very best anti-tracking and ad-blocking extensions for Firefox. With Chrome and the long-term viability of extensions on other
Chromium-based browsers in doubt, it’s increasingly clear that Firefox is the way forward.
We’d love to recommend Linux-specific browsers such as Falkon, but the built-in adblock extension does not have a stellar reputation for being user-friendly, and
Falkon’s overall performance is not quite up there with the best Mozilla has to offer. Perhaps the inevitable exodus from the Googlesphere will prompt increased investment in competent independent browser development, but then again, maybe not.
Firefox has another major advantage in the upcoming browser wars: it’s truly multi-platform, with builds available for Windows, Mac OS, Android and iOS. Linux-specific browsers have a tiny market share of what is already a tiny market share, and worthy as they may be, can’t attract the kind of massive investment needed – at least, not before January 2023.
As we said, Firefox will remain Manifest V2 compatible until the sun explodes, and all the extensions that currently help you to stay safe and anonymous online will remain until the heat death of the universe. Here’s what you should be looking at…
• uBlock Origin
We’ve been using uBlock Origin on our personal machines since it came to our attention in May 2016 as Mozilla’s Extension of the Month. It’s the first and often only add-on we install when we initialise a new machine.
Once the extension is installed and activated, you rarely even notice it’s there. It doesn’t leave ad placeholders, so you don’t even register that advertisements are missing.
UBlock Origin can be turned on and off on a per-site basis – if, for some reason, you like viewing ads and being tracked – and individual elements can be removed from a page with the click of a button.
• Privacy Badger
UBlock Origin is a great anti-tracking extension, but its primary purpose is as an ad-blocker. Privacy Badger, from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a little different, and as with the remaining items on this list, its sole raison d’être is to stop companies and individuals tracking you as you go about your daily routine.
We say “routine” because Privacy Badger actually does learn your routine. It learns your browsing habits and blocks tracking scripts and cookies in the background. If an advertiser seems to be tracking you across multiple domains, Privacy Badger blocks that advertiser from loading any more content in your web browser.
This demonstrates an obvious difference in philosophy between Privacy Badger and ad-blockerbased anti-tracking extensions in that Privacy Badger recognises that the internet as we know it today needs advertisements to function. It allows the ‘good adverts’ to be displayed – earning revenue for hard-working, ethical websites – while fooling unethical ad and tracking networks into thinking that you have disappeared entirely.
It has no built-in blacklists and, by default, Privacy Badger does not block first-party trackers, such as the ones used by a site for analytics purposes. It’s only once trackers start stalking you to a different site that Privacy Badger takes action.
A side effect of starting with a blank slate and blocking trackers based on behaviour is that ads will slowly start to wink out of existence as their tracking
becomes obvious. And as for what badgers have to do with anything, we don’t know.
• Privacy Possum
Privacy Possum is based on the excellent Privacy Badger and was created by one of the engineers who worked on the project. It takes a completely different approach to preventing companies from following you. Put simply, it doesn’t.
Privacy Possum allows trackers to stalk you all they want – but they’ll never ever be able to get an accurate idea of who it is they’re following.
It blocks cookies that let trackers uniquely identify you across websites. It blocks refer headers that reveal your browsing location. It blocks etag tracking, which leverages browser caching to uniquely identify you. And it blocks browser fingerprinting, which tracks the inherent uniqueness of your browser.
Without these unique identifiers, it doesn’t matter who is tracking you, they will never be able to link any of the information, and better yet – it actually costs them money without giving anything in return.
Browser fingerprinting – using the attributes of your browser such as installed fonts, screen resolution and language packs – is also spoofed, rather than hidden.
To use an analogy, if the tracking companies or government agents on your tail are looking for a short, blonde woman with tattoos, Privacy Possum transforms you into a 6’ 5” skinhead bloke with a flat cap and a natty moustache. Then it turns you into something else instead.
Why possums? Possibly because they pretend to be dead. The extension creator hasn’t said.
• Ghostery
Sounds spooky, eh? We love that it conjures up images of us coasting across the internet unseen and undetected, like some child of an exotic phantasm – especially as this feature was written in the run-up to Halloween.
Ghostery advertises itself as enabling “cleaner, faster, safer browsing”, and as its mascot, it has a friendly little spook.
In reality, Ghostery isn’t that much different from the other blockers and offers you control on a trackerby-tracker basis from a handy and visually pleasing dashboard, which lists all of the trackers on the page you’re viewing or interacting with. From there, you can block each tracker either just on the current page or across the entire web. Ghostery doesn’t use blacklists and leaves decisions in your hands.
Ghostery is also very focused on performance and improving user experience – by default, it blocks trackers that slow down the web and unblocks trackers if blocking them breaks the web page you’re attempting to access.
To our mind, however, this isn’t ideal, because it could lead to a situation in which tracking companies deliberately create trackers that break websites if they are not allowed.
The bottom line
Each of these anti-tracking extensions focuses on a different area. UBlock Origin is for people who hate adverts and hate tracking; Privacy Badger is all about heuristic learning and making sure that trackers behave themselves; Privacy Possum would prefer that tracking companies go bust; while Ghostery is about a fast, clean user experience.
Which extension you go for is up to you, depending on which model best suits your needs. We like them all.
Earlier, we mentioned in passing that extensions occasionally change ownership or are deliberately compromised by their developers in order to make a quick buck from users. We seriously doubt that the creators of uBlock Origin, Privacy Possum, Privacy Badger or Ghostery are going to sell out, but we can’t guarantee it. Make sure you check the GitHub repositories regularly for any reported problems or changes in contributors.