Mozilla’s mission is to build a better Internet. Right now, that means building one with an increased focus on user privacy with help from the fine folks at the Tor Project. They’re calling this new initiative Polaris, and their first set of privacy tweaks have already landed in Firefox nightly builds.
Polaris is backed by Mozilla and two other non-profits: the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the Tor Project. Their goal is to increase collaboration and “accelerate advances in privacy technology for the Web, protecting users and putting them back in control.
To kick things off, Mozilla is taking a long, hard look at Tor. There are a couple reasons why they are. First, they want to figure out how they might be able to use some of the tweaks the Tor project has made to the version of Firefox they ship in their browser bundle and integrate them into the mainstream Firefox codebase.
That would not only boost the privacy powers of Firefox, but it would also free up Torproject contributors to work on other things. If their code gets merged into Firefox, they don’t need to make as many modifications to the browser before shipping it in the Tor bundle — giving them more time to focus on things like privacy, speed, and network capacity.
And speaking of network capacity, Mozilla is going to help out there, too. They’ve offered to set up several Tor middle nodes, which will allow the Tor network to support a greater amount of traffic and improve speeds.
As for the changes that have already landed in Firefox nightly builds, Mozilla is looking at ways to selectively block content in the name of privacy without penalizing online advertisers too harshly. To try it out, you’ll need to grab a recent nightly build and setbrowser.polaris.enabled to true on the about:config page.
Since the feature blocks HTTP transmissions from untrusted domains, you’ll probably notice a bit of breakage on the websites you browse… but that’s a small price to pay for tracking protectionthat actually works.
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