Firefox's private-browsing mode now includes tracking protection, which limits the data that websites can collect while you're browsing them.
Now, if you're shopping for shoes and put a pair in your online shopping bag, but never complete the transaction, you might see an ad for those shoes pop up elsewhere later. Tracking protection will prevent the shoe website from collecting the data needed to produce that ad, said Nick Nguyen, a vice president at Mozilla, which makes Firefox.
"If you go to a store and buy a pair of shoes, they don't know your name or anything about you," Nguyen said. "But online, you click a link and you don't know you're being tracked until after you're tracked."
When it's in private browsing mode, Firefox will now block third-party trackers from being loaded at all, making the user invisible to most forms of tracking technology, he said.
The feature can be turned off if users desire.
"It's not a perfect solution," Nguyen said. 'But it's much better than having nothing and we'll continue to evolve it."
