Security News > 2021 > March > Firefox 87 Adds Stronger User Privacy Protections
Mozilla today announced the release of Firefox 87 in the stable channel fitted with a new intelligent tracker blocking mechanism.
Called SmartBlock, the feature works in Firefox Private Browsing and Strict Mode and is meant to improve users' browsing experience through fixing pages that Mozilla's tracking protections break.
Firefox has had a built-in Content Blocking feature since 2015, providing increased protections to those who use Private Browsing windows and Strict Tracking Protection Mode.
Thus, Firefox Private Browsing windows could prevent these companies from tracking users across the web, but the privacy protections often resulted in the blocking of components essential for the proper functioning of some websites.
"To reduce this breakage, Firefox 87 is now introducing a new privacy feature we are calling SmartBlock. SmartBlock intelligently fixes up web pages that are broken by our tracking protections, without compromising user privacy," Mozilla announced.
Firefox 87 sets the default Referrer Policy to 'strict-origin-when-cross-origin', meaning that user sensitive information that is accessible in the URL will always be trimmed, for all "Navigational requests, redirected requests, and subresource requests." The new policy will be enforced automatically upon updating to Firefox 87.