Beginning 2021, Mozilla plans to launch the network partitioning feature with its browser Firefox 85. This new feature will enhance the browsers’ anti-tracking feature.
Mozilla Launches Network Partitioning
Recently, Mozilla has decided to roll out an interesting new feature with the upcoming Firefox browser version. Specifically, the tech giant plans to release ‘network partitioning’ with Firefox 85 that it will launch in January 2021.
As disclosed by ZDNet, this new feature will jazz-up the browser’s anti-tracking features, providing more privacy to the users.
In simple words, network partitioning is the process of segregating storage for different tracking resources instead of pooling them together.
As a standard practice, websites and browsers interact in many ways to store data, aside from cookies. Some of these include HTTP cache, favicon cache, image cache, font cache, and many others.
The data shared from these sources are stored in the same pool. Thus, it allows tracking elements to use this data and track users, even when cookies fail.
However, with network partitioning, the browser will prevent this sharing of data by different websites, thereby preventing the tracking elements.
Mozilla Not The First To Launch It
Although, for Firefox users, network partitioning will be a new feature.
However, Mozilla isn’t the first to introduce such a feature.
Earlier, Apple launched this feature in different phases, by first partitioning the HTTP cache. Later on, they did the same with other resources.
Whereas, recently, with Chrome 86, Google also launched HTTP cache partitioning that even worked.
However, Mozilla’s decision is still noteworthy as Firefox 85 will come with a more comprehensive partitioning. Specifically, the upcoming Firefox browser will address the following resources as well together with HTTP cache.
- Image cache
- Favicon cache
- StyleSheet cache
- Font cache
- DNS
- Connection pooling
- HTTP authentication
- Alt-Svc
- Preconnect
- Speculative connections
- Intermediate CA cache
- Prefetch
- HSTS
- OCSP
- TLS session identifiers
- TLS client certificates
- CORS-preflight cache
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