Firefox 67 Speed, New Privacy Controls For Cryptomining And Fingerprinting Added

With the release of Firefox 57 in 2017, Mozilla rebranded its open-source browser as Firefox Quantum and outlined ambitions to take the fight to market leader Google. Since then, Mozilla has steadily changed the look and feel of Firefox, and added functions such as Firefox Send, Facebook Container, and Firefox Monitor.

With Firefox 67, Mozilla continues to bisect privacy and performance, with a focus on the latter. Mozilla is pumping the brakes on less common features, choosing to identify areas in which the browser could operate quicker. The browser game is a cruel one; many internet denizens aren't concerned with which browser they use, but more so with how fast it is.

To that tune, Mozilla is promising to focus on important website code, with main scripts for Instagram, Amazon, and Google searches executing between 40 to 80 percent faster. Firefox will also now scan for alternate style sheets after a page load, and the auto-fill module won't load unless there is actually a form to fill.

Alongside those changes, Firefox will now suspend background tabs if it detects the system is approaching 400MB or less of memory. This is aimed at optimizing multi-tab performance, especially in systems without much free memory. Firefox will also startup faster for those who have customized their browser with extensions and add-ons.

There is also a faster AV1 video decoder, named "dav1d", which has been jointly developed by Mozilla, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google. For users running Windows 10 and an Nvidia graphics card, there is now support for the long promised WebRender.

Not to leave out privacy, Firefox can now block cryptocurrency mining scripts that leverage users' CPUs in the background. With that, digital fingerprinting can be blocked as well, as part of Mozilla's anti-tracking approach. You can learn more about all the new privacy and performance additions to Firefox 67 in Mozilla's blog post.