Firefox Extensions for Private Surfing 🔒
by Bradley Nice, Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — professional technical writing tool
Today, with the Internet and modern communications, privacy is a hot topic. It is now possible to steal someone’s private details and even someone’s identity. That’s why nowadays we should pay more attention to the websites we visit, to their privacy policies in order not to leave our personal info all over the net.
“Think of the Internet as a public place. Don’t leave your details lying around.”
University of Edinburgh, online postgraduate student
Mozilla Firefox is one of the most popular web browsers after Google Chrome. So if you are a Firefox type of person you might be interested in the following list of 12 Firefox extensions that will give you more control of your personal information.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers
Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs that preserve your privacy. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.
With the Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension, you can:
- Sign in to two different accounts on the same site (for example, you could sign in to work email and home email in two different Container tabs.
- Keep different kinds of browsing far away from each other (for example, you might use one Container tab for managing your Checking Account and a different Container tab for searching for new songs by your favorite band)
- Avoid leaving social-network footprints all over the web (for example, you could use a Container tab for signing in to a social network, and use a different tab for visiting online news sites, keeping your social identity separate from tracking scripts on news sites)
Facebook Container
This extension helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. This makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on other websites via third-party cookies.
Rather than stop using a service you find valuable and miss out on those adorable photos of your nephew, we think you should have tools to limit what data others can collect about you.
Bloody Vikings!
Bloody Vikings! simplifies the use of temporary email addresses, helping you to protect your real address from spam and to stay anonymous.
Instead of exposing your real email address to every random site asking for it, simply right-click on the designated input field and select “Bloody Vikings!”. Bloody Vikings! automatically inserts a temporary email address and opens the corresponding mailbox in a new background tab.
Cookie AutoDelete
When a tab closes, any cookies not being used are automatically deleted. Whitelist the ones you trust while deleting the rest. Support for Container Tabs.
Decentraleyes
Websites have increasingly begun to rely much more on large third-parties for content delivery. Canceling requests for ads or trackers is usually without issue, however blocking actual content, not unexpectedly, breaks pages. The aim of this add-on is to cut-out the middleman by providing lightning speed delivery of local (bundled) files to improve online privacy.
- Protects privacy by evading large delivery networks that claim to offer free services.
- Complements regular blockers such as uBlock Origin (recommended), Adblock Plus, et al.
- Works directly out of the box; absolutely no prior configuration required.
Disconnect
Visualize and block the otherwise invisible websites that track your search and browsing history.
Disconnect was named the best privacy tool by the New York Times (2016), Innovation Award winner for Best Privacy and Security software at South by Southwest (2015), listed as one of the 100 best innovations of the year by Popular Science and one of the 20 best Chrome extensions by Lifehacker.
- Load the pages you go to up to 44% faster and save up to 39% bandwidth.
- Stop tracking by thousands of third-party sites.
Disconnect for Facebook
Disconnect for Facebook™ is an efficient firewall to prevent Facebook from tracking the webpages you go to by blocking all Facebook related requests sent from all third-party websites. Although Facebook Disconnect blocks all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers but still you can visit your Facebook account with no problem.
3 reasons to use Facebook Disconnect:
- Stops Facebook from tracking the webpages you go to
- Has a very low memory and CPU footprint
- Can be easily toggled on and off from the toolbar button
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
This add-on provides the privacy essentials you need to seamlessly take control of your personal information, no matter where the Internet takes you:
- Escape Advertising Tracker Networks — Privacy Protection will block all the hidden third-party trackers we can find, exposing the major advertising networks tracking you over time, so that you can track who’s trying to track you.
- Increase Encryption Protection —Forces sites to use an encrypted connection where available, protecting your data from prying eyes, like ISPs.
- Search Privately — You share your most personal information with your search engine, like your financial, medical, and political questions. What you search for is your own business, which is why DuckDuckGo search doesn’t track you. Ever.
- Decode Privacy Policies — We’ve partnered with Terms of Service Didn’t Read to include their scores and labels of website terms of service and privacy policies, where available.
This add-on also adds a toolbar icon that shows you a Privacy Grade rating when you visit a website (A-F). This rating lets you see how protected you are at a glance, dig into the details to see who we caught trying to track you, and learn how we enhanced the underlying site’s privacy measures. The Privacy Grade is scored automatically based on the prevalence of hidden tracker networks, encryption availability, and website privacy practices.
History Cleaner
This extension deletes history older than a specified amount of days. Set the number of days to keep history items in the options page. Setting it to 0 will disable history deletion. The deletion will occur when the browser goes idle (after 1 minute of inactivity).
Privacy Badger
Privacy Badger automatically learns to block invisible trackers. Instead of keeping lists of what to block, Privacy Badger learns by watching which domains appear to be tracking you as you browse the Web. If trackers ignore your wishes to not be tracked (aka you have Do Not Track enabled), your Badger will learn to block them. Besides automatic tracker blocking, Privacy Badger also removes outgoing link click tracking on Facebook and Twitter.
Privacy Possum
Privacy marsupials are here to help you manage your data. Or to help you mess up the data collected by third-party-trackers. Privacy Possum disrupts common commercial tracking methods by reducing and falsifying the data gathered by tracking companies.
Smart HTTPS
HTTP is the way a server communicates with the browser. It enables visitors to view a website and send information back and forth to the server. HTTPS is communication through a secured connection. Communications through an HTTPS with the server are encrypted by a secure certificate known as an SSL. The encryption prevents third-parties from eavesdropping on communications to and from the server. Smart HTTPS automatically changes HTTP protocol to the secure HTTPS when it is available. If it encounters error while loading a site in HTTPS it will reverts it back to the HTTP so your browsing experience is seamless.
What browsers and extensions do you use for safe web surfing? Please, share in the comments.
Have a nice day!
Bradley Nice,
Content Manager at ClickHelp.com — best online documentation tool for SaaS vendors
