Security on the web matters. Whenever you connect to a web page and enter a password, a credit card number, or other sensitive information, you want to be sure that this information is kept secure. Whether you are writing a personal email or reading a page on a medical condition, you don’t want that information leaked to eavesdroppers on the network who have no business prying into your personal communications.

Download Firefox Extensions to add features that customize browsing. Protect passwords, find deals, enhance video, and block annoying ads with browser apps. Firefox is a 1982 American action techno-thriller film produced, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.It is based upon the 1977 novel of the same name by Craig Thomas. The film was set in Russia, but Cold War considerations had Eastwood's and Fritz Manes's Malpaso Company using Vienna and other locations in Austria to double for many of the Eurasian story locations. Download Firefox Extensions to add features that customize browsing. Protect passwords, find deals, enhance video, and block annoying ads with browser apps.

That’s why Mozilla is pleased to introduce HTTPS-Only Mode, a brand-new security feature available in Firefox 83. When you enable HTTPS-Only Mode:

• Firefox attempts to establish fully secure connections to every website, and
• Firefox asks for your permission before connecting to a website that doesn’t support secure connections.

How HTTPS-Only Mode works

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a fundamental protocol through which web browsers and websites communicate. However, data transferred by the regular HTTP protocol is unprotected and transferred in cleartext, such that attackers are able to view, steal, or even tamper with the transmitted data. HTTP over TLS (HTTPS) fixes this security shortcoming by creating a secure and encrypted connection between your browser and the website you’re visiting. You know a website is using HTTPS when you see the lock icon in the address bar:

The majority of websites already support HTTPS, and those that don’t are increasingly uncommon. Regrettably, websites often fall back to using the insecure and outdated HTTP protocol. Additionally, the web contains millions of legacy HTTP links that point to insecure versions of websites. When you click on such a link, browsers traditionally connect to the website using the insecure HTTP protocol.

In light of the very high availability of HTTPS, we believe that it is time to let our users choose to always use HTTPS. That’s why we have created HTTPS-Only Mode, which ensures that Firefox doesn’t make any insecure connections without your permission. When you enable HTTPS-Only Mode, Firefox tries to establish a fully secure connection to the website you are visiting.

Whether you click on an HTTP link, or you manually enter an HTTP address, Firefox will use HTTPS instead. Here’s what that upgrade looks like:

How to turn on HTTPS-Only Mode

If you are eager to try this new security enhancing feature, enabling HTTPS-Only Mode is simple:

1. Click on Firefox’s menu button and choose “Preferences”.
2. Select “Privacy & Security” and scroll down to the section “HTTPS-Only Mode”.
3. Choose “Enable HTTPS-Only Mode in all windows”.

Once HTTPS-Only Mode is turned on, you can browse the web as you always do, with confidence that Firefox will upgrade web connections to be secure whenever possible, and keep you safe by default. For the small number of websites that don’t yet support HTTPS, Firefox will display an error message that explains the security risk and asks you whether or not you want to connect to the website using HTTP. Here’s what the error message looks like:

It also can happen, rarely, that a website itself is available over HTTPS but resources within the website, such as images or videos, are not available over HTTPS. Consequently, some web pages may not look right or might malfunction. In that case, you can temporarily disable HTTPS-Only Mode for that site by clicking the lock icon in the address bar:

The future of the web is HTTPS-Only

Once HTTPS becomes even more widely supported by websites than it is today, we expect it will be possible for web browsers to deprecate HTTP connections and require HTTPS for all websites. In summary, HTTPS-Only Mode is the future of web browsing!

Thank You

We are grateful to many Mozillians for making HTTPS-Only Mode possible, including but not limited to the work of Meridel Walkington, Eric Pang, Martin Thomson, Steven Englehardt, Alice Fleischmann, Angela Lazar, Mikal Lewis, Wennie Leung, Frederik Braun, Tom Ritter, June Wilde, Sebastian Streich, Daniel Veditz, Prangya Basu, Dragana Damjanovic, Valentin Gosu, Chris Lonnen, Andrew Overholt, and Selena Deckelmann. We also want to acknowledge the work of our friends at the EFF, who pioneered a similar approach in HTTPS Everywhere’s EASE Mode. It’s a privilege to work with people who are passionate about building the web we want: free, independent and secure.

Today we are pleased to announce Total Cookie Protection, a major privacy advance in Firefox built into ETP Strict Mode. Total Cookie Protection 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.

Cookies, those well-known morsels of data that web browsers store on a website’s behalf, are a useful technology, but also a serious privacy vulnerability. That’s because the prevailing behavior of web browsers allows cookies to be shared between websites, thereby enabling those who would spy on you to “tag” your browser and track you as you browse. This type of cookie-based tracking has long been the most prevalent method for gathering intelligence on users. It’s a key component of the mass commercial tracking that allows advertising companies to quietly build a detailed personal profile of you.

In 2019, Firefox introduced Enhanced Tracking Protection by default, blocking cookies from companies that have been identified as trackers by our partners at Disconnect. But we wanted to take protections to the next level and create even more comprehensive protections against cookie-based tracking to ensure that no cookies can be used to track you from site to site as you browse the web.

Our new feature, Total Cookie Protection, works by maintaining a separate “cookie jar” for each website you visit. Any time a website, or third-party content embedded in a website, deposits a cookie in your browser, that cookie is confined to the cookie jar assigned to that website, such that it is not allowed to be shared with any other website.

Total Cookie Protection creates a separate cookie jar for each website you visit. (Illustration: Meghan Newell)

In addition, Total Cookie Protection 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. Only when Total Cookie Protection detects that you intend to use a provider, will it give that provider permission to use a cross-site cookie specifically for the site you’re currently visiting. Such momentary exceptions allow for strong privacy protection without affecting your browsing experience.

In combination with the Supercookie Protections we announced last month, Total Cookie Protection provides comprehensive partitioning of cookies and other site data between websites in Firefox. Together these features prevent websites from being able to “tag” your browser, thereby eliminating the most pervasive cross-site tracking technique.

Google Firefox Free Download

To learn more technical details about how Total Cookie Protection works under the hood, you can read the MDN page on State Partitioning and our blog post on Mozilla Hacks.

Thank you

Total Cookie Protection touches many parts of Firefox, and was the work of many members of our engineering team: Andrea Marchesini, Gary Chen, Nihanth Subramanya, Paul Zühlcke, Steven Englehardt, Tanvi Vyas, Anne van Kesteren, Ethan Tseng, Prangya Basu, Wennie Leung, Ehsan Akhgari, and Dimi Lee.

We wish to express our gratitude to the many Mozillians who contributed to and supported this work, including: Selena Deckelmann, Mikal Lewis, Tom Ritter, Eric Rescorla, Olli Pettay, Kim Moir, Gregory Mierzwinski, Doug Thayer, and Vicky Chin.

Total Cookie Protection is an evolution of the First-Party-Isolation feature, a privacy protection that is shipped in Tor Browser. We are thankful to the Tor Project for that close collaboration.

Firefox Http Sniffer

We also want to acknowledge past and ongoing work by colleagues in the Brave, Chrome, and Safari teams to develop state partitioning in their own browsers.