Firefox 87 Released With SmartBlock for Improved Private Browsing

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Firefox 87 is released today and it has an intelligent tracker blocking mechanism for FF in private browsing and strict mode. Dubbed SmartBlock, this new feature automatically fixes problems associated with protections using private browsing and strict mode where there may be broken images and poor web page performance. The existing protections may also block helpful components, and SmartBlock aims to reduce this "breakage".

SmartBlock does this by providing local stand-ins for blocked third-party tracking scripts. These stand-in scripts behave just enough like the original ones to make sure that the website works properly. They allow broken sites relying on the original scripts to load with their functionality intact.

The SmartBlock stand-ins are bundled with Firefox: no actual third-party content from the trackers are loaded at all, so there is no chance for them to track you this way. And, of course, the stand-ins themselves do not contain any code that would support tracking functionality.

[blog.mozilla.org...]