On November 10, one of the world’s most popular browsers celebrated its 10th birthday. It’s hard to believe that Firefox is only 10, largely because it has become such an integral part of business life that it’s difficult to imagine a time when it wasn’t around. In order to celebrate the recent milestone, Mozilla has released a special Firefox update with two interesting new features.
Feature 1: DuckDuckGo is standard
While the vast majority of Internet users tend to gravitate towards Google Search whenever they need to find something, there are actually other search engines out there. One of the more popular is DuckDuckGo which bills itself as a search engine that is:
- private
- low on clutter
- smarter
The reason this search engine has become so popular with users is that it does not track user data and activities like Google or Bing. Also, when you search using this engine, you get results with minimal clutter, which is preferred by some users.
With the Firefox 10 year anniversary update, DuckDuckGo is now the core search engine used by the browser when searching using the search bar beside the URL bar, at the top of the window. Of course, if you prefer Google or Bing’s more advanced features and information then you can always set these engines to be used instead of DuckDuckGo. Privacy-focused users however are sure to find this change useful.
Feature 2: Firefox gets a little more forgetful
We often see being forgetful as a negative, but in the case of the new Forget feature introduced in the last update to Firefox, it’s a good thing. This new feature allows users to quickly erase their search and user activity. When you update your browser, you should see a red circle with a backwards facing arrow at the top of the window. Clicking this will open the Forget menu which will allow you to:
- Forget the last five minutes
- Forget the last two hours
- Forget the last 24 hours
Clicking one of the options will:
- Close all open tabs and windows.
- Delete recent cookies.
- Delete recent history.
- Open a new, blank Firefox window.
While this may not seem like the most useful of features for business users, there are some situations when this will come in handy. The first being if you are using a public computer with Firefox installed, or are connected to a public Wi-Fi network. Once you are done browsing, you can tell Firefox to forget all of your information. This in turn makes browsing a little safer.
Beyond this, you can also use it to ‘forget’ sensitive login information like bank accounts and systems that store private data etc. In other words, this feature makes sure that the chances of sensitive and private data being seen by other users or hackers is reduced.
If you use Firefox and would like to access the new features, all you have to do is update your browser – often just closing and restarting it should trigger the update. If you already use Firefox then you may have received the latest version and the features should be active. If you don’t use Firefox and would like to utilize the latest features along with increased browsing security, you can download the browser from Mozilla’s Firefox website.
If you have any questions regarding Firefox and how it can be used in your organization, please contact us.
