Firefox 86 Adds Total Cookie Protection, More

Mozilla released Firefox 86 today, adding Total Cookie Protection, improved picture-in-picture capabilities, and a new printing experience.

“At Mozilla, we believe you have a right to privacy,” the release notes for Firefox 86 read. “You shouldn’t be tracked online. Whether you are checking your bank balance, looking for the best doctor, or shopping for shoes, unscrupulous tracking companies should not be able to track you as you browse the Web. For that reason, we are continuously working to harden Firefox against online tracking of our users.”

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Here’s what’s new in Firefox 86.

Total Cookie Protection. This new feature “confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site,” Mozilla notes. But it also makes a limited exception for cross-site cookies when they are needed for non-tracking purposes, such as those used by popular third-party login providers.

Improved picture-in-picture capabilities. Firefox has long supported video picture-in-picture (PIP) capabilities, but now it’s been improved to support multiple videos and keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind.

New printing experience. The Print functionality has been updated with a cleaner design and better integration with your computer’s printer settings.

Credit card management and auto-fill improvements. This feature is now enabled for Firefox users in Canada.

Performance and stability improvements. Mozilla says it has made “notable” performance and stability improvements by “moving canvas drawing and WebGL drawing to the GPU process.”

You can download Firefox 86 now for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

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Conversation 2 comments

  • sherlockholmes

    Premium Member
    23 February, 2021 - 12:02 pm

    <p>I hope Brad never finds that feature. Otherwise he wouldnt be able to steal coockies anymore 😛 </p>

  • dftf

    23 February, 2021 - 1:08 pm

    <p>Helpful new-features for-sure, yet Firefox just can't see to attract users back thesedays.</p><p><br></p><p>Going by Statista, and looking at only desktop OS browsers, Firefox has fallen from 18.7% market-share in Jan 2015, to 8.4% as-of Dec 2020. By-contrast, Safari: 4.9% to 10.4%; Google Chrome 51.7% to 66.0%; and Microsoft Edge 0% to 7.4%. All the other major-browsers have gained; Firefox is the only one to have lost.</p><p><br></p><p>And StatCounter report similar: on desktop OS', Firefox has gone from 9.9% (Jan 2020) to 8.1% (Jan 2021), and on Android, iOS and iPadOS devices, from 1.2% to 0.7% for the same months.</p><p><br></p><p>I'm not-sure how well "second-tier" Chromium browsers, such as Brave or Vivaldi, are doing, as most stat sites simply count them as "Chrome", not separately. But it wouldn't surprise me if combined there were more-users of them than Firefox — especially on mobile devices</p>

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