Beginning last year, the internet began playing a bigger role in our lives than ever before. In the US, we went from only three percent of workers to more than forty percent working from home in 2020, all powered by the web. We also relied on it to stay informed, and connect with friends and family when we couldn’t meet in-person.
And despite the many difficulties we all have faced online and offline, we’re proud to keep making Firefox an essential part of what makes the web work.
Today I’m sharing two new features: multiple picture-in-picture (multi-PiP) and our latest privacy protection combo. Multi-PiP allows multiple videos to play at the same time — all the adorable animal videos or NCAA Tournament anyone? And our latest privacy protection, the dynamic duo of Total Cookie Protection (technically known as State Partitioning or Dynamic First-Party Isolation) and Supercookie Protections (launched in last month’s release) are here to combat cross-site cookie tracking once and for all.
Today’s Firefox features:
Multiple Picture-in-Picture to help multi-task
Our Picture-in-Picture feature topped our Best of Firefox 2020 features list and we heard from people who wanted more than just one picture-in-picture view. In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Haven’t been to a zoo in a while? Now, you can visit your favorite animal at the zoo, along with any other animals around the world with multiple views. Also, we can’t help that it coincides with one of the biggest sports events this year in March.
New privacy protections to stop cookie tracking
Today, we are announcing Total Cookie Protection for Firefox, a major new milestone in our work to protect your privacy. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website. Total Cookie Protection joins our suite of privacy protections called ETP (Enhanced Tracking Protection). In combining Total Cookie Protection with last month’s supercookie protections, Firefox is now armed with very strong, comprehensive protection against cookie tracking. This will be available in ETP Strict Mode in both the desktop and Android version. Here’s how it works:
In our ongoing commitment to bring the best innovations in privacy, we are working tirelessly to improve how Firefox protects our users from tracking. In 2019, Firefox introduced Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) which blocks cookies from known, identified trackers, based on the Disconnect list. To bring even more comprehensive protection, Total Cookie Protection confines all cookies from each website in a separate cookie jar so that cookies can no longer be used to track you across the web as you browse from site to site. For a technical look at how this works, you can dig into the details in our post on our Security Blog. You can turn on Total Cookie Protection by setting your Firefox privacy controls to Strict mode.
Join our journey to evolve Firefox
If it’s been a while since you’ve used Firefox, now is the time to try Firefox again and see today’s features. You can download the latest version of Firefox for your desktop and mobile devices and get ready for an exciting year ahead.